INFRASTRUCTURE: HARMONISATION
Pa¥ ing in p€rf€ct harmon¥ As we hover on the brink of the latest attempt to bring real-time settlement synergy to the Eurozone, we asked two leading industry players – Gabrielle Bugat, who heads up G+D’s Card & Digital Payment business, and Andrej Vckovski, CEO and Co-founder of Netcetera – if it’s really possible to unite the world’s payment systems (among other burning issues!)
“I don’t see convergence coming any time soon,” says Gabrielle Bugat, who heads up G+D’s Card & Digital Payment business. Well, you can’t put it plainer than that. She is referring to the likelihood of the world’s payments systems agreeing on a fully harmonious solution for real-time, cross-border transactions. And she’s sceptical, not because the technology isn’t capable of delivering it. But because, as she puts it, ‘we’re so different’. “I was once in the same room as someone from Finland and someone from the US and, even though they were both speaking English, they were not speaking about the same thing when it comes to payments, because one country is credit intensive and, in the other, they say ‘we can’t spend what we don’t have’. Just with this sentence, you understand that convergence will not happen.” Her comments come as the EU
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– on the face of it, one of the most homogenous payments regions in the world, ‘united’ by a common currency – is on the cusp of trying to achieve what the Single European Payments Area Instant Transfer (SEPA Inst), the Jean Monnet Project and numerous other payment alignment schemes have tried and failed to do in the past, albeit in a different way. The European Payments Initiative (EPI), due to go live next year, is just the latest attempt to create a one-for-all settlement network, compatible with all current and future transaction methods in every member state. More than the well-known challenges – marrying up diverse systems, platforms and regulation – the fundamental barrier to harmonisation is culture, believes Bugat: the simple fact that the human beings who are the end-users of payment networks have very different needs, and deeply embedded views of what good looks like when it comes to meeting them. That doesn’t mean we should all give up and go home. Rather, her vision is for global payment flows that, for want of a better phrase, talk the same digital language, while allowing for different accents. “The challenge is to develop common platforms on which we can have local customisations, so that every country can keep its cultural specificities, while at the same time benefitting from the latest and greatest technology – particularly technology that protects against fraud because fraudsters will always be innovative in attacking systems,” says Bugat. For her, payments are not just about the mechanics of a transaction; they have a more emblematic role – reflecting the
nuances between geographical populations while enabling them to interact and collaborate. That is where the true innovation comes in, she believes. “In the payment technology business, the world is our sandbox. This is what excites me, because every country is different and can bring a new set of challenges; it’s technology meeting culture and habits,” says Bugat. “You have countries that have leapfrogged from no infrastructure to a really advanced one, countries where the challenge is dealing with very old legacy, some might rely more on credit, others on debit. “With G+D being international, I’ve worked on different continents, and seen the diversity of how people pay. It’s great getting everybody to rethink and transform the technology, bring new innovation to the field – sometimes, even, presenting an innovation that was thought of in one country to another, say the Philippines to Canada. This kind of collective payments intelligence is what really inspires me.” www.fintechf.com