"This book is designed to provide the reader with an insight into the main concepts involved in the handling of payments, securities and derivatives and the organisation and functioning of the market infrastructure concerned. Emphasis is placed on the general principles governing the functioning of the relevant systems and processes and the presentation of the underlying economic, business, legal, institutional, organisational and policy issues. The book is aimed at decision-makers, practitioners, lawyers and academics wishing to acquire a deeper understanding of market infrastructure issues. It should also prove useful for students with an interest in monetary and financial issues."--Introduction (Pg. 20, para 8).

The European payment market has undergone rapid transformation in recent years due to changes in payment habits, new business rules and new legal frameworks and regulation. There has also been an advent of new technologies and payment solutions which has altered the European payments landscape drastically. This book provides an overview of the fundamental issues involved in this new payments landscape. The authors discuss fundamental problems such as substitution between cash and non-cash payment instruments, payment costs, the economics of fees, and the demand for cash and deposit money. They also analyse issues such as two-sided markets, business platforms and the problem of critical mass. Other chapters focus on new phenomena in payments such as mobile payments, multi-sided platforms, electronic wallets, virtual currencies, decentralised ledgers, private digital currencies, blockchain and instant payments. The authors also review existing regulation for the topic including the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2), Interchange Fee Regulation (IF/MIF Reg), and the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) project. Transforming Payment Systems in Europe offers insight into changing payment culture and the ways in which new payment systems can create a single digital market to foster further integration in Europe.

When the term “governance” is associated with money, the mind goes directly to the traditional regulatory paradigm, i.e. the nation State-Central Banking-Currency. However, over time, there has been a steady erosion of the nation states’ sovereignty, also in the area of monetary law. This process of erosion is still working from within and externally to the nation State or, in other words, from upwards to downwards and vice versa. Moving from upwards to downwards, highly interconnected financial markets have urged the national competent authorities to improve the global level of coordination in terms of sharing regulatory standards, supervisory models and risk-monitoring procedures. In the downwards-upwards direction, the concept of sovereignty is critically revised from the perspective of new and alternative means of payment, thanks to the growth of e-commerce and mobile commerce and new complementary currency projects. The European Union is a feasible institutional context in which to investigate the development of the governance of money. Indeed, the EU, considered as a “unique economic and political partnership”, has not laid down a clear-cut definition of money, but the Member States have been carrying on a varying transfer of sovereignty and, in particular, of monetary sovereignty. This book examines money as a means of payment and a reserve of value within the framework of the European Union, with particular attention to community-based currencies. This book will prove an interesting and informative read for academics, students and policymakers with an interest in the development of monetary and financial systems.