‘Retail payment systems in Europe and the United States: lessons for European payment system integration and evaluation of bank sector strategies’

Anthony Saunders, Francisco Rodríguez Fernández, Nadia Massoud.

In the last two decades, technological advances have combined with changes in monetary areas (primarily the advent of the euro) to bring an unprecedented transformation in worldwide payment systems.

Out of the many areas meriting study -from both a macroeconomic and microeconomic standpoint- this research centres on a comparison between US and European payment systems with reference to three questions which we consider of major importance:

1) the integration of retail payment systems in Europe;

2) the strategies pursued by banks in rolling out new means of payment;

3) an assessment of how the well-being of consumers (and society at large) is affected by progress in the integration of European retail payment systems, and by the payment service strategies being deployed by financial institutions.