must subsequently develop the rules and standards that are needed in order to establish technical interoperability for card payments. another important issue is cards standardisation, which is crucial to ensure the interoperability and harmonised use of cards across europe. in the area of standardisation, there is a clear separation of responsibilities. first, the european payments council ( epc ) is responsible for the strategic vision and business rules for cards. second, the cards stakeholders group is responsible for establishing functional, security and procedural requirements. third, various market initiatives have developed implementation standards and specifications for the various domains of card payments. this is very welcome ; however, work on the implementation of these specifications is lagging behind and should be accelerated. in the field of security certification for cards and terminals, a set of implementation specifications have been developed by the common approval scheme ( cas ). however, governance - related aspects of the sepa security certification framework are still under discussion. therefore, we urge the epc and cas members to swiftly agree on concrete proposals for a permanent governance structure with regard to security certification for cards and terminals. last, but not least, i would like to stress that, from a european perspective, it is of strategic importance to adopt a more coordinated approach to global standard - setting bodies, such as the iso and emvco. these requirements should lay the foundation for a competitive european cards market. however, i personally believe that the european cards market would also benefit from the power of choice. therefore, a duopoly in the european cards market is not the outcome that i would prefer to see for the sepa project, which brings me to new year ’ s resolution number three. new year ’ s resolution number three : let ’ s move forward with an additional european card scheme the eurosystem has been calling for an additional european card scheme for four years. therefore, we are closely monitoring the work of the three initiatives that have been launched. it is important to emphasise that we have not selected any “ favourite ” out of the three projects, but treat all three equally. all three face some of the same challenges : the main challenge is certainty as regards the potential business case. some clarity has been provided with regard to the sensitive issue of multilateral interchange fees ( mif ) thanks to the agreements reached by the eu commission with visa and mastercard. however, the market asks for more certainty and it may be that this must ultimately be provided in the form of a regulation. i would

commercial risk tolerance may differ from social risk tolerance. in the seventh sepa progress report we dedicated a chapter to the topic of security. by sending a number of ambitious messages we have ensured that the necessary attention will be paid to this topic. one of these messages was our expectation that the cards industry in europe will issue “ chip - only ” cards from 2012. but if the industry decides to retain the magnetic stripe on cards for practical reasons, we would ask that any data enabling the processing of magnetic stripe transactions should be removed. this should ensure that sensitive account information can no longer be copied. the current levels of fraud clearly show that something needs to be done urgently in this respect. the increasing level of card - not - present fraud carried out over the internet can be addressed by the introduction of secure payment protocols ( e. g. 3d secure or virtual cards ). to encourage the use of such security measures, a liability shift – which has been used, for example, as an incentive for emv migration – could be applied. clearly, sepa requires a harmonised minimum level of security for retail payments to ensure transparency and a level playing field. in order to achieve this, we need to have more clarity about the security requirements as well as about the actors involved in setting these requirements. we have recently launched the idea to set up a forum for security issues and have received a positive feedback from banks. such a forum would monitor market developments. in addition it could enable the relevant authorities, including banking supervisors and central banks, to align their expectations on security. the eurosystem is currently investigating what could be the precise mandate and composition of such a forum. conclusion i have to admit that these five new year ’ s resolutions are quite demanding. but i believe they are essential for the sepa project. if all of us continue to work on sepa with the same level of dedication as this year, we can accomplish all of them.