zeb.Financial Market Roundtable in Frankfurt:

“Bargeld und Bytes – wie wir in Zukunft bezahlen werden” (Cash and bytes – payments of the future) was the headline of the zeb.Financial Market Roundtable with Bundesbank Executive Board member Burkhard Balz in Frankfurt. Burkhard Balz addressed CEOs of Frankfurt-based financial institutions, outlining current trends in international payment transactions and the future of payments. In his welcome speech, zeb Partner Thorsten Helbig emphasized the importance of finding pan-European answers to the increasing influence of big tech companies. Helbig stressed that technological companies and platforms, such as Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook from the USA, but also Alibaba and Tencent from China, were highly innovative when it came to customer centricity, data expertise and alternative payment systems, putting Europe under pressure to act.
During the lively discussion, Balz pointed out that both the Bundesbank and the entire Eurosystem attached great importance to letting people choose their preferred forms of payment, so the Bundesbank clearly wouldn’t give up on cash anytime soon. He argued that at the end of the day, the market would decide which forms of payment were going to prevail. However, he was fairly certain that the importance of digital payments was going to increase along with the world’s growing digitalization. He identified a variety of trends. For example, the Bundesbank expects payment by smartphone to further gain in importance, and according to Balz, the same applies to online payments – after all, more and more activities are turning online. He explained that this was why the Bundesbank endorsed the European Payments Initiative (EPI) and elaborated: “We are collaborating with other central banks in the euro area to promote pan-European payment solutions.” One such solution has already been successfully implemented: the mobile wallet “Wero”, which enables SEPA-based, free-of-charge instant money transfers between private customers. Other applications of Wero are set to follow soon, in particular e-commerce payments, which should become available in 2025. At the same time, the euro area is working on another pillar of its monetary future – the digital euro. According to Balz, the digital euro is intended to become another form of legal tender in order to establish it as a generally accepted means of payment throughout Europe, similar to cash. “The digital euro will make us more independent when it comes to payment transactions, because it has its own infrastructure that does not rely on European providers,” he said. Balz emphasized that the digital euro should be seen as a supplement to the existing means of payment and was not intended to replace or displace cash or any banking industry initiatives. By 2028 according to current plans, it is supposed to offer real added value to the citizens of the euro area. Burkhard Balz concluded his presentation with a vision: “I hope that by then consumers will see the digital euro as ‘digital freedom’, just as cash is nowadays often referred to as ‘printed freedom’.”

Impressionen