The ‘‘Payment System” as a Normative Paradigm in the European Harmonisation Process

Money, history and the European legal framework are among Professor Benjamin Geva’s leading research interests. I am truly delighted to share this area of study with him, and I am honoured to participate in this publishing project. My essay aims to analyze how the payment system has become a normative paradigm in the European harmonization process. This paper consists of six further sections. Section two outlines the sources of law material on the construction of an internal market for payment, taking into account the pro-competitive approach of European policymakers. Section three focuses on the three reports — the 1989 Angell Report, the 1990 Lamfalussy Report on the netting schemes and the 2001 study on the Core principles for systematically important payment systems — published under the aegis of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), assuming that they have influenced the European harmonization process for wholesale payments. Sections four, five and six turn to the European harmonization process for retail payments with the aim of addressing changes in the regulatory approach between the mid-70s and 2000s: while at the beginning, the European legal framework focused on the payment instrument and the single user-provider contracting relationship, it later began to treat the monetary payment as a single payment service value chain exhibiting two-sided consumption externalities. Section seven draws some conclusions.