“Yet despite this surfeit of choices, many of Europe’s largest banks are backing an effort to build a new European-wide payments network that could replace national payments networks and challenge the dominance of Visa and Mastercard across the continent…Previous efforts to create such a pan-European payments network failed. Most recently, one called the Monnet Project collapsed before it ever got off the ground in 2011. This time, the project is likely to at least make it to launch. That’s because the new European Payments Initiative (EPI for short) is as much about politics as it is about business.”

“More than 30 of Europe’s largest banks and credit card processors are trying to create a payments giant capable of shattering a US-dominated “oligopoly”. A Brussels-based venture, which currently employs 40 payment experts, has until September to draw up a blueprint for a pan-European payments service that can be used to pay online as well as in stores, to settle bills between individual consumers and to withdraw cash at ATMs. “The idea is to build a European payment champion that can take on PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, Google and Apple,” said Joachim Schmalzl, the chair of the European Payment Initiative.”

“The European Payments Initiative, a bank-backed joint venture that aims to build a rival to Mastercard and Visa, has put out a Request for Information for ‘qualified technical partners’ to help build its central infrastructure. Backed by 31 major Eurozone banks and acquirers Wordlline and Nets, the EPI is striving to create a unified pan-European payment system, offering a card for consumers and merchants across Europe, a digital wallet and P2P payments.”

“Today, EPI Interim Company, responsible for initiating the implementation of the European Payments Initiative (EPI), is pleased to announce that PKO Bank Polski (“PKO BP”), Poland’s largest bank, and OP Financial Group, the leading Finnish retail bank, are joining EPI as founding shareholders of the recently created company. Furthermore, a group of 12 Spanish credit institutions banks has also formed a consortium and are joining EPI as a collective founding shareholder of the EPI Interim Company.”

“The European Payments Initiative (EPI) has entered its next phase with Worldline and Nets becoming shareholders of the EPI Interim Company. Meanwhile, third-party acquirers have joined the initiative. The EPI was created by 16 European banks in July to provide a unified, innovative pan-European payment solution leveraging Instant Payment/SEPA Instant Credit Transfer, which offers a card for consumers and merchants across Europe, a digital wallet and P2P payments.”

“A glitch in the European Central Bank’s system for settling large-value payments by commercial and central banks has resulted in a drop in deposits worth more than 400 billion euros ($473 billions).    The interruption — which occurred on Friday and lasted more than 11 hours — meant large institutions were unable to move their cash in the usual way. The failure was illustrated in data published Tuesday by the ECB that shows a 416 billion-euro slump in the use of the deposit facility at the central bank. The cash remained in banks’ current accounts, and the balances have since returned to normal. Still, the incident highlights the critical role of the payments infrastructure for the euro area, and the risks that could be posed from a longer outage.”

“The European Central Bank blamed a software defect for a disruption to the region’s main wholesale payment system last week that left banks unable to process transactions and securities trades for almost 11 hours. The outage on Friday paralyzed the ECB’s Target2 payments system, which provides the plumbing that allows money to flow across the bloc’s single market. Owned and operated by the region’s central banks, it processes around €2 trillion in transactions a day, equivalent to $2.35 trillion and to around a fifth of the eurozone’s annual economic output. The “major incident” took place at about 2:40 p.m. on Friday, according to the ECB. After a backup system failed, commercial banks couldn’t process transactions through about 1:20 a.m. the following morning. While European businesses and individuals could continue to make payments, the money wasn’t landing where it should.”