Swedish banks dissent European payment initiative – invests in Nordic co-operation. Lack of technical excellence or advantage for Nordic co-operation P27 are just two of the reasons behind the major Swedish banks’ decision to opt out of the pan-European European Payment Initiative, EPI.
A total of 31 major European banks have joined forces to create a pan-European payment infrastructure with the aim of eventually being able to compete with the established infrastructures Visa, Mastercard or Paypal. But the Swedish banks have so far opted out of the European Payment Initiative, EPI .
There are several reasons, including that the Nordic region has come further in terms of becoming a cashless market, says Lotta Lovén, CIO and head of Digital Banking & IT at Swedbank, to Realtid.
„In the Nordic region, we do not see the same need as several of the countries in Central Europe have to get our customers to use digital payment solutions such as cards and Swish. Several of the countries behind EPI still have a very large cash use, for example Germany with a cash use of over 70 percent. In addition, in many countries there are domestic card systems such as Girokarte in Germany and BanContact in Belgium – very few countries outside the Nordic region have succeeded in uniting the banks with a system such as Swish; it is very fragmented,” she says.
Furthermore, Lotta Lovén believes that EPI’s solution does not meet the customers’ or the bank’s own needs, while existing solutions, in particular Visas or Mastercards, instead already do.
„When it comes to card solutions, we have been working for a long time with the global card regulations such as Mastercard and Visa, which are at the forefront of technical development. We want to give our customers a product that they can use all over the world – not just in Sweden or Europe. Our customers do not have to think about whether they can use their card for payment wherever they are in the world. In other words, EPI does not offer a solution to a problem that our customers have.”
Click here to find out what other Swedish banks have to say about the attractiveness of the European Payment Initiative (EPI).
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Many more interesting quotes in the video below:
