what i mentioned earlier, customers must be able to easily initiate an instant payment from an online shopping environment and the merchant must instantly receive confirmation that the payment has been executed. the revised payment services directive ( psd2 ) provides a stable legislative framework for such services and aims to foster innovation and competition in this field. the erpb, taking the revised psd2 and the close - to - final regulatory technical standards as a basis, has supported the industry in its endeavours to reach agreement on the necessary technical, operational and business elements to ensure the pan - european provision of innovative and competitive payment initiation services. this work is well under way and will be concluded by june this year. in parallel, the european commission has encouraged a group of market actors to evaluate application programming interface ( api ) technical specifications to ensure that they will meet market needs and will be fit for purpose when accessing customer accounts to initiate payments. security the psd2 provides many opportunities for innovative services, including, but not limited to, ecommerce payment solutions. such solutions require standardised access to accounts, but also security throughout the payment chain. the psd2 regulatory technical standards on strong customer authentication and common and secure communication strike a good balance between the needs of consumers, third - party providers and banks. they will probably not be applicable until september 2019 at the earliest. since the main provisions of the psd2 have been in effect since last month, i call on payment service providers to fulfil the requirements of the regulatory technical standards, even if they are not yet legally required to do so, during the transition period until these standards enter into force. it is in their own interests to do so, as this will guarantee the high security levels that are necessary to retain public trust in the payment system and payment services. instant payments versus virtual currencies smart, pan - european instant payment solutions meet the needs of end - users in the digital age, being fast and easy to use as well as safe and reliable. the sct inst scheme and the underlying market infrastructure are subject to eurosystem oversight, and settlement takes place in central bank money. by contrast, so - called virtual currency schemes such as bitcoin, which have been 2 / 3 bis central bankers'speeches touted by some as the payment method of the future, cannot achieve that. first, bitcoin is not a currency but simply a speculative digital asset. it tends to be processed inefficiently and

life below zero : learning about negative interest rates ”, presentation at the annual dinner of the ecb's money market contact group, frankfurt am main, 9 september 2014 see for instance european central bank, “ summary of the discussion of the money market contact group ”, 9 september 2015 see coeure, b., “ interview with politico ”, 30 march 2016 bis central bankers ’ speeches central bank holdings of a particular security are sizeable relative to the total amount issued, that security becomes scarcer. this can translate into longer inventory holding problems and higher trading costs and this case investors will be more reluctant to hold those securities. in other words, the impact of the pspp on market liquidity remains an empirical question. and looking at the available data, we do not see evidence of significant disruptions in market functioning. first, price discovery appears to be smooth and issuers are able to place new securities to the market in large volumes. trading volumes have not fallen systematically as a result of pspp. based on tradeweb data, trading volumes in core markets such as germany are roughly 5 % lower than two years ago. however, trading volumes in italian, spanish and portuguese bonds on that platform are around 20 % higher. that said one should not draw hasty conclusions from what remains a fragile set of indicators. too little is known of the liquidity offered by dealers to end - investors. and therefore, the ecb will monitor market liquidity carefully as our asset purchase programme is further rolled out. second, it is important to learn from arthur conan doyle and note ‘ the dogs that didn ’ t bark ’. we have witnessed several shocks since we began our purchase programme that, in other conditions, might have led to substantial market volatility. for example, the major realignments of global fx reserve portfolios in the summer of last year passed without a significant increase in euro area yields or yield volatility. in this sense, the presence of pspp has aided market functioning by providing a constant source of demand in the market and by flexibly directing this demand towards particularly oversold securities. at the same time, the spike in sovereign yields in portugal earlier this year shows that our monetary policy has not suppressed market discipline. finally, as general remark, one should always keep in mind that our combined measures are designed to prevent growth and inflation from being too low for too long. if we allowed such a situation to materialise, the impact on banks and investors would be