##2, the list of activities that payment institutions can carry out is being expanded to include the initiation of payments, i. e. they can initiate a payment on your behalf. they can also provide account information for accounts held at other payment service providers. actually, payment initiation services provided by third parties have existed in the market for some time now. they have been emerging in parallel with e - commerce, i. e. online shopping, offering an alternative to established payment instruments and services that were – understandably – neither conceived nor wholly suitable for the e - commerce environment. in particular, these third parties have been serving as an alternative way to carry out card - not - present payments, i. e. card payments via the phone, internet or other channels where the cardholder cannot physically present the card to the payee. this is how it works. when you make a payment online, instead of having to input the payment details into the online banking tool provided by your bank, typing in the amount, the recipient ’ s account details, etc., you access your online banking tool via the third party service provider, which provides the transaction - related data for you. simultaneously, the e - commerce merchant, or online retailer, receives an automatic payment notification that the payment has been completed successfully. while in some european countries, for example in the netherlands, banks began offering these payment initiation services, in other countries, such as germany, new providers entered the market. legally, these third party service providers have been operating in a grey zone. at the same time, their emergence demonstrates that an actual market need was not being covered sufficiently by the traditional market. the rationale behind the regulatory formalisation of payment initiation service providers and account information service providers with payment services directive 2 has many aspects. on the one hand, it is meant to increase competition in the market. it should remove obstacles that have been hindering non - banks from entering the payments service market. in particular, banks will not be allowed to reject access of third party service providers to the accounts that they hold. more indirectly, the provisions in psd2 may also push banks to innovate in order not to be forsaken by customers in favour of non - bank payment service providers. last but not least, the directive may also stimulate new business models and forms of cooperation between banks and non - banks. the need for a level playing field on which to compete goes both ways. all entities providing retail payment services to end -

and before you receive the confirmation of the payment in your account statement. intuitively, the idea behind instant payments is that cashless payments become as instantaneous as cash payments, meaning that funds are immediately available to the payment recipient. some may say that there is no real need for instant payments, that a payment guarantee is sufficient in e - commerce. but we have to be aware that we are not only dealing with customer needs but also with customer expectations. at the european central bank, we receive quite frequently requests and comments from european citizens and companies regarding retail payments, and one comment that appears time and again perfectly illustrates my point. this is the comment that in the digital era, it is incomprehensible why e - payments should take longer than e - mails. people expect instant payments to be as self - evident as other services delivered via the internet, e. g. instant messages, movie streaming or instagram. nobody would accept an e - mail being delivered with the same time lag of a letter sent by surface mail. why then does an electronic payment still take a full day at least? in the following, i will discuss the three layers that are required for us to achieve instant payments : the scheme layer, the clearing layer and the settlement layer. the scheme layer refers to a set of rules and technical standards that have to be followed by payment service providers. it can be understood as a common instruction manual on how to move funds from one account to another. you may ask why we need a common scheme for instant payments. after all, innovative payment services based on instant payments are already being implemented by some national communities in europe. however, even if they are often based on the same technical standards, these services lack common rules and the harmonised implementation of standards and are therefore not easily interoperable. this means that, for example, a service deployed in germany cannot be easily used in france. what we want is for electronic payment means to work for you wherever you are, whether you are paying by card, online, or using your smartphone. with the creation of sepa, we have made huge efforts to integrate the european retail payments market. why should we not take advantage of the harmonisation and integration already achieved with the sepa project in working towards instant payments? i believe that payment service users do not want to be swamped by dozens of different solutions, having to subscribe to different platforms depending on what they want to do. what they want is a