olaf sleijpen : from ding dong to bleep bleep - promoting innovative retail payments markets in a fragmented world speech by mr olaf sleijpen, executive board member of monetary affairs and financial stability of the netherlands bank, at the annual conference of the european payment institutions federation ( epif ), brussels, 20 november 2024. * * * thank you. some 35 years ago, when i was a student traveling through europe on my summer holidays, i took traveler cheques with me. everybody in the room knows what a cheque is? although you had to purchase them for a fee, they were safer than taking lots of foreign currency with you hidden in your money belt. but the drawback was you could not pay with those cheques in shops or restaurants. you had to go to a local bank branch to exchange them for cash. so one of the first things you did when you arrived in a new country was to queue up in a crowded local bank. at the sound of a'ding dong ', it was finally your turn, and you could only hope that the grumpy bank employee would be willing to hand over some precious local currency in exchange for your cheque. for a considerable fee of course. and provided it wasn't weekend. or some local holiday. or lunch - time. today, when i want to get something to drink in a cafa© in a little town somewhere in spain or estonia, i just take my mobile phone or card, hold it near some wireless little box, wait for the'bleep bleep ', and i have paid. it's magic! i can hardly think of a single activity that we do so often, and that has become so much easier, safer and quicker, than paying. it has become so easy, it's almost fun to pay! what has made this payment revolution possible is a combination of new technologies, regulation that opened up payments markets, and increased competition. fifteen years ago, the payment services directives kicked in. it allowed non - banks to access the european market by obtaining a license in one member state and " passport " their payment services to other eu member states. later on, psd2 granted non - banks access to payment accounts, with the consent of the payment account holder. as a result of these developments, a whole new group of innovative non - bank payment service providers entered the european market with smart, convenient and high - quality services

crisis consensus view is reflected in the institutional setup of our economic and monetary union. while the european central bank is mandated to maintain price stability, under complete independence, the member states are required to follow a set of fiscal rules that limit government indebtedness. this is all laid down in the stability and growth pact, or sgp. at the core of the sgp are a set of well - known fiscal rules. the most important ones being that the government deficit should not exceed 3 % of gdp and that government debt should not be higher than 60 % of gdp. again, the main purpose of these rules, which continues to be relevant today, is to safeguard the ecb ’ s independence and to help prevent debt sustainability risks from spilling over from one member state to others. despite its merits, there was one thing that the emu fiscal architecture was not designed for. and that was to ensure an appropriate fiscal stance at the union - wide level. a fiscal stance that takes account of the condition of the euro area economy and is aligned with the monetary stance of the central bank. after all, decisions on spending and taxation are the responsibility of national governments. discretionary fiscal stabilization policy is possible, but only as long as the conditions of the sgp are satisfied. the dominant thinking was that a budget balance close to zero or in surplus in good times would create sufficient fiscal space for automatic stabilizers to stabilize the economy in bad times. this would be enough for fiscal policy to support monetary policy in smoothing out national business cycle fluctuations and ensuring stability of the monetary union. so we thought. then came the global financial crisis of 2008. and a few years later, the european sovereign debt crisis. these crises taught us the hard way that the pre - crisis consensus view on the role of fiscal policy was incomplete. it was incomplete because it did not take into account episodes in which countries would face a very large shock and in which low interest rates would limit the scope for monetary stimulus. this design flaw of the fiscal architecture in the emu became painfully apparent during the european sovereign debt crisis. multiple member states were hit hard by the unwinding of macroeconomic imbalances that had built up in previous years. as fears started to emerge about their debt sustainability, sovereign bond spreads in the euro rea started to diverge, triggering a self - fulfilling crisis. the ecb ’ s outright monetary transactions and former president draghi ’ s infamous “ whatever it takes ” speech in 2012 signalled the