International Payments

Mathias Entenmann is vice president of International for PayPal. He joined PayPal in October 2003, previously serving as managing director for PayPal Europe. Prior to joining PayPal, Entenmann served as founder and chief executive officer for Paybox.net AG, a provider of mobile phone-based payment systems, located in Germany. Previously, he held various positions with Arthur D Little International and SAS Institute.

The turn out for IBC’s annual SEPA conference last month highlighted how much of a burning issue the Single Euro Payments Area has become to banks and payments processors, even if only 22% of corporates are aware of what it actually means. European Commission head of Unit Payments and Retail Issues, David Deacon’s keynote speech certainly livened up the proceedings with the announcement that the EC will be introducing an ‘incentives project’ to encourage SEPA implementation next year. Virginie O’shea reports.

Finland is situated in Northern Europe, bordering the Baltic Sea, the Gulf of Bothnia, and the Gulf of Finland, and land borders with Sweden, Norway and Russia. The country has a highly industrialised, largely free-market economy, with a per capita output roughly that of the UK, France, Germany, and Italy. Its key economic sector is manufacturing, principally the wood, metals, engineering, telecommunications, and electronics industries. In fact it has often been described as a ‘communications superpower’ due to the prevalence of Nokia in the mobile phone market and the penetration of internet usage in Finnish homes. The economy is testament to this success with forecasting institutions predicting 4% economic growth in Finland over 2006. If the forecast proves accurate, the country’s gross domestic product will grow at double the rate of the Eurozone.

Operational efficiency is becoming the key differentiator among financial institutions. Mike Thrower, director of marketing at Wall Street Systems, looks at the current drivers affecting operational efficiency and proposes a framework for continuous improvement.

We are now at the end stage of the process leading to the approval of the New Legal Framework (NLF) and of the new payment schemes for cards, credit transfers and direct debits. With this, the scene will be set for banks, bank groups, cards companies, automated clearing houses (ACHs) and many more for the ‘battle of the euro payment market’. Eurogiro is determined to play a key role in and around the future SEPA payment market. Henrik Parl, managing director of Eurogiro, provides an insight.

Practitioners in the billing and payments industry have long been aware that the end-to-end billing and payment process continues to be a source of potential improvement for companies. To begin with, generating a bill, invoice or statement and ensuring payment involves a vast array of business and technology processes and typically adds a significant amount of customer service overhead in the way of bill queries, payment reminders and collection procedures. Steve Wright, chairman of the payments initiative at CheckFree, explains.

“Banks should move to pan-European platforms” is the message coming from both the politicians at the European Commission and from the regulators at the European Central Bank (ECB). This strategy has focused very much on the retail level and the automated clearing house (ACH) business, but it applies equally to high-value payments. EBA Clearing puts forward its view for the future prospects of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA).

Cash still makes up 96.5% of transactions under US$10 in the US, according to research by the Aite Group. In 2005, only 3.1% of low value transactions were conducted using cards and 0.4% using cheques. Out of 138 billion transactions, 50% were..

Following the publication of the Office of Fair Trading’s report into electronic payment mechanisms in the UK in May, the Association of Payments Clearing Services (APACS) has now nearly reached the end of its deadline to choose its preferred..

The UK Office of Fair Trading’s (OFT) Payment Systems Taskforce has launched an investigation into cheque clearing times, which is due to culminate in a report on the subject in summer 2006. The taskforce, which was formed in 2004, has..

The Bank of Estonia has finally launched its new and improved interbank payment system, dubbed the Settlement System of Ordinary Payments (ESTA), which is an updated version of the Designated-Time Net Settlement System (DNS). It is hoped that the..

After nine months of deliberation, financial messaging network Swift has finally released its response to the Giovannini Barrier 1 Consultation Paper, which deals with clearing and settlement in the EU. As well as the release of this response, Swift..

Officially recorded global remittances exceeded US$232 billion this year, according to recently released figures from the World Bank. Of this, developing countries received US$167 billion, which is more than twice the level of development..

IBC’s annual SEPA conference got off to a prodigious start last month as it set off alarm bells, both literally and figuratively. Or rather, the fire alarm was not the only point of concern for delegates – European Commission head of..