The European banking industry joined forces to achieve a fully integrated market for retail payment services in the euro area: the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). Against this background, the present paper examines the fundamental relationship between retail payment business and overall bank performance. Using data from across 27 European markets over the period 2000–2007, we analyse whether ...

The Electronic Money Directives of the European Union, concerned with the regulation and prudential supervision of electronic money institutions, have now been implemented in the United Kingdom. The implementing provisions are found in a number of disparate legislative instruments. This article identifies the various legislative instruments concerned and articulates the key elements of the regu...

The European banking industry joined forces to achieve a fully integrated market for retail payment services in the euro area: the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). Against this background, the present paper examines the fundamental relationship between retail payment business and overall bank performance. Using data from across 27 European markets over the period 2000-07, we analyse whether th...

The business of payments and the provision of payment instruments have a rich history, which can be drawn upon in a discussion of standardization. In the middle-ages, for example, the mere existence of a wide variety of foreign and local coins led to a flourishing business of money exchange offices and cashiers in the Netherlands. Malpractices of some of these firms, mostly in the form of physi...

The growing importance of electronic commerce has resulted in the birth of a plethora of different and incompatible payment systems. For business application writers this implies the need to understand the details of different mechanisms, to adapt the code as soon new payment schemes arrive and also to provide a way of finding a common mechanism for every transaction. In our work, we unify the ...

E-banking has grown dramatically with the development of ICT industry and banks offer their services to customers from different channels. Nowadays, considering the great economic benefits of electronic banking systems, the need to pay attention to the expansion of electronic banking is increasingly felt in terms of reducing costs and increasing the bank's profitability. The purpose of this stu...

Launching in Romania the banking products and services with long-distance access was based on image motives for the Romanian banks, domestic institutions or foreign banks branches. In this way, banks wanted to be innovative and they didn’t address necessarily to their clients’ needs. Once the long-distance payment instruments diversified and once the clients became aware of the benefits of such...