Volume 20 (2026)

This paper proposes a two-pillar model for a harmonised universal application programming interface (API) stack for European payments. Pillar 1 is a common, service-oriented API layer that decouples access channels from bank services. It standardises functional capabilities and data, and separates channel-specific customer authentication from authentication/authorisation of technical client systems. Once implemented, the same payment and data services can be consistently exposed to online channels, customer systems and external partners. The result is lower time-to-market, simplified compliance and scalable multi-channel distribution, determined by product value and risk, rather than integration constraints. Pillar 2 enables scheme and region-governed overlays; commercial terms and value-added services that build on the common layer without breaking interoperability. Schemes provide further scoping through implementation guides and extensions for routing, directories, aliases, test suites, certification, service-level agreements, liability frameworks and change control. A subsidiarity principle preserves local policy autonomy while the shared core ensures cross-border coherence. The model is a greenfield target architecture requiring phased migration, interoperability bridges and deprecation timelines. Its feasibility is reinforced by existing practice: the Berlin Group openFinance API Framework, used by around 80 per cent of European banks and nearly all third-party providers, already incorporates key elements and is expanding to card and wallet use cases. The two-pillar approach offers a pragmatic path to efficiency, innovation and supervisory clarity at a pan-European scale. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at http://hstalks.com/business.
Keywords: PSD3; PSR; FIDA; open banking; open finance; open data; digital euro; harmonised standardisation; Berlin Group API Framework

This paper shows that the advent of agentic commerce, in which artificial intelligence (AI) agents act as proxies for consumers, represents a structural shift that challenges the trust architecture of digital payments. Although agentic commerce promises major gains in convenience and automation, the paper demonstrates that inserting an AI agent between the consumer and the merchant creates a ‘data chasm’ that interrupts the flow of behavioural, device and contextual data on which modern fraud detection and risk assessment models depend. These data streams allow issuers to infer whether a transaction is legitimate. Without them, the issuer’s view of the transaction environment becomes materially thinner. While emerging agentic commerce protocols propose alternative trust mechanisms, such as cryptographic mandates, agent verification registries and structured delegation frameworks, the analysis shows that these signals are qualitatively different from, and potentially less robust than, the multi-layered behavioural indicators they replace. As a result, issuers are likely to experience greater uncertainty, adopt more conservative risk postures and generate higher rates of false positive declines, reducing merchant authorisation rates. The paper thus identifies a fundamental tension in the shift to agentic commerce, showing how efforts to streamline the front-end experience may ultimately erode the trust mechanisms that have enabled decades of seamless authorisation, destabilising the back-end processes on which modern digital payments depend. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at https://hstalks.com/business/.
Keywords: agentic commerce; payments; card payments; acquiring; issuing

Digital identity has become a foundational layer of contemporary payments and e-commerce infrastructure, shaping how trust, authentication, personalisation and regulatory compliance are established between consumers, merchants, platforms and public authorities. As online transactions scale globally, diversify across channels and increase in economic value, identity systems increasingly influence platform competitiveness by affecting conversion rates, fraud losses, customer lifetime value and cross-border operability. This paper synthesises academic research, regulatory frameworks and selected industry evidence to trace the evolution of digital identity technologies, examine their economic and operational significance in payments and e-commerce, and identify persistent challenges related to privacy, interoperability, inclusion and artificial intelligence enabled fraud. Recent regulatory initiatives such as the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act, the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Council’s Recommendation on Artificial Intelligence signal a growing convergence between digital identity governance, AI risk management and data protection, expanding the scope of identity-related responsibilities for platforms and regulators. Drawing on socio-technical systems theory, trust–risk perspectives and transaction cost economics, this paper develops a comparative conceptual framework of identity models and proposes a structured research agenda focused on decentralised credentials, explainable and risk-based identity systems, privacy-preserving verification and cross-border identity integration. The paper contributes by consolidating fragmented literatures and articulating testable directions for future payments strategy and systems research. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at https://hstalks.com/business/.
Keywords: digital identity; payments; fraud prevention; risk-based authentication; interoperability; strong customer authentication (SCA); AI governance; digital wallets; financial inclusion

As financial activity becomes increasingly global, institutions need a reliable way to recognise individuals across borders. As the successful adoption of the Legal Entity Identifier demonstrates, international identification frameworks are achievable when standards and oversight are aligned. Developing an equivalent system for natural persons, however, is considerably more complex. A Natural Person Identifier (NPI) would need to operate across diverse legal systems, privacy regimes and administrative traditions, and would require levels of cooperation that nation states are yet to reach. This paper examines what identity numbers are, how they are created, and the legal frameworks that govern their use. It considers what an NPI would need to achieve in the context of global financial transactions, and which international bodies could act as trusted clearinghouses for cross-border verification. The paper reviews how passports (ie machine-readable travel documents) have become widely accepted as proof of identity, and explains the processes that make them secure and internationally trusted. Drawing on this example, it explores whether a similar model could support a global NPI, and how standardisation groups and United Nations bodies might work more closely with the payments industry to develop a practical solution. The paper is intended for policymakers and practitioners involved in identity management, standardisation and the implementation of NPIs in financial systems. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at https://hstalks.com/business/.
Keywords: Natural Person Identifier; know your customer; ISO standards; ICAO; travel documents; national ID number

A new era of stablecoins and digital money has appeared. Stablecoins have demonstrated product-market-fit and real-world demand for cross-border payments activity. Importantly, they have also broken the link between crypto prices and payments volume growth. At the same time, the European Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) and the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act 2025 are now laws, firmly positioning stablecoins in the mainstream. This means that financial institutions must bring stablecoins into their scenario planning and ask questions about the strategic impact of stablecoins on financial market infrastructure (FMI). This paper explores that potential impact to help organisations formulate their own strategies. In particular, the paper draws on an historical analogy, from the roots of the Industrial Revolution in England, to suggest that stablecoins are a necessary but interim innovation in payments, but that it is the development of new kinds of financial institutions made possible by such innovation that will be the paradigm shift in FMI for the new economy. In short, innovation around stablecoins will in time engender much more radical innovation around digital assets and the institutions to create, store and exchange these assets. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at https://hstalks.com/business/.
Keywords: money; payments; digital currency; digital assets

In Q1 2025, cross-border remittance costs into Sub-Saharan Africa averaged 8.78 per cent for a US$200 transfer, nearly three times the UN Sustainable Development Goal target of 3 per cent. This gap persists despite advances in instant payments, stablecoins, card push networks and faster payment linkages. This paper argues the challenge is not a lack of payment innovation, but rather receiver-side structural constraints such as foreign exchange market depth, liquidity availability, regulatory frameworks, last-mile infrastructure and institutional coordination. Using a corridor-based ‘rubric versus rails’ framework, the paper evaluates four payment rails (correspondent banking, faster payment system linkages, stablecoins and card push payments) against five criteria (access, cost, speed, compliance quality, and settlement risk). It examines three representative Sub-Saharan African constraint patterns, namely, scale-constrained corridors, liquidity-constrained corridors and infrastructure-fragmented corridors. The analysis finds no single rail performs optimally across all dimensions. Correspondent banking maintains reach but remains costly. Faster payment system linkages are constrained by absent real-time FX, weak compliance harmonisation, and limited governance frameworks. Stablecoins show promise in addressing FX scarcity and mobile-first delivery gaps, but depend on last-mile infrastructure. Card push rails remain supplementary, constrained by low card penetration and mobile money dominance. The paper argues that cross-border payments will evolve toward layered multi-rail architectures tailored to corridor conditions. Cost reduction will come from orchestration across rails, not rail replacement. For Sub-Saharan Africa, regional aggregation models such as PAPSS, combined with stablecoin-enabled FX settlement and instant-payment last-mile delivery, offer a more credible path to G20 targets than bilateral rail optimisation. This paper is Part I of a two-part series. Part II applies the framework to Latin America. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at https://hstalks.com/business/.
Keywords: cross-border payments; remittances; receiver-side constraints; Sub-Saharan-Africa; hybrid rail orchestration; faster payment systems; stablecoins

The global wholesale foreign exchange (FX) regime constitutes the world’s largest financial market. The key to its continuing growth and success lies in its ability to adapt to change while ensuring effective settlement risk mitigation and efficient liquidity optimisation arrangements like netting that are crucial to the smooth turnover of US$9.5tn daily. This paper explores several of the current transformative trends taking hold in the FX market, such as emerging technologies and new business needs. This paper also examines their potential impact and some of the challenges they face, with a particular focus on liquidity optimisation. This article is also included in the Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at http://hstalks/business.
Keywords: FX market; digital money; liquidity management; payments; wholesale foreign exchange

Speed is a recurring theme in almost any discussion about payments, usually because people feel payments are not fast enough. Whether the debate is about launching instant payment services, introducing regulations to speed up adoption, international efforts to remove barriers to cross-border payments (eg initiatives by Bank for International Settlements1 and the Financial Stability Board2), or the belief that distributed ledger technology will make everything instant, speed is often treated as a problem that can be solved simply by adding new technology, standards or systems. However, while technology has certainly made payments faster over the past decade, it is not the only factor. This paper outlines key issues that arise when moving from intraday to immediate processing, suggesting that not everything scales as easily as technology. The paper argues that speed is a scarce resource and comes at a cost. The relationship between payment speed, settlement risk and the availability and cost of liquidity provides a useful way to understand the trade-offs involved, and shows why the challenge cannot be viewed through a purely technological lens. Liquidity is a crucial part of the payment process and must be built into system design. Fragmented market infrastructures, and limits on the ability to schedule or delay payments, will affect the overall cost of making payments. These factors should be carefully considered when shaping the underlying ‘plumbing’ of the financial system. This article is also included in the Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at http://hstalks/business.
Keywords: choice; fragmentation; liquidity; payments; risk; speed; treasury

Traditional payment infrastructure, particularly for cross-border corridors and exotic currency pairs, imposes temporal constraints that create measurable inefficiencies in corporate treasury operations and working-capital management. While domestic real-time payment systems have substantially narrowed settlement windows in major currencies, cross-border settlement remains fragmented across time zones and banking calendars. This paper examines fiat-backed stablecoins as programmable settlement infrastructure that can compress finality windows while introducing novel operational, counterparty, compliance and technical risks. Unlike algorithmic or crypto-collateralised stablecoins that have experienced catastrophic failures, fiat-backed designs maintain reserves in traditional assets and are increasingly subject to regulatory classification as electronic money instruments rather than speculative assets, as evidenced by the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) framework. This paper contributes: (1) a four-dimensional risk-control framework synthesised from operational risk management principles and adapted for stablecoin-specific exposures (reserve quality, redemption mechanics, compliance orchestration, technical reliability); (2) a reproducible total cost of payment (TCP) methodology that enables comparative analysis across legacy rails (cards, automated clearing houses, wires, real-time payments) and stablecoins; (3) a multi-dimensional evaluation comparing settlement infrastructure across finality, availability, geographic reach, programmability, cost, regulatory clarity and counterparty risk; (4) a policy-current mapping to the EU’s MiCA application schedule and US/UK supervisory trajectories; and (5) a network-selection rubric with audit-ready control taxonomy and measurable key risk indicators. This article is also included in the Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at http://hstalks/business.
Keywords: digital assets regulation; fiat-backed stablecoins; governance; operational risk and controls; risk and control; settlement and payment infrastructure; transaction banking; treasury and liquidity management

Money is changing, both in its form and in how it moves. Tokenised deposits, stablecoins and programmable infrastructure are enabling 24/7 cross-border and cross-currency payments with profound implications for corporate treasuries of multinational organisations. This paper highlights how these instruments could augment treasury operations by enabling more dynamic, intelligent and real-time liquidity orchestration across time zones and legal entities. It introduces a framework in which stablecoins support mobility, tokenised deposits provide secure storage, and tokenised money market funds offer intraday yield, together transforming liquidity from static end-of-day positions into a continuous, programmable flow, orchestrated around business events rather than discrete settlement cut-offs. It then contrasts how the new capabilities could apply across treasury archetypes. For global business-to-business corporates, structured and forecastable flows benefit from 24/7 access to cross-border liquidity positioning. For global merchants, high-volume, consumer-driven flows align with stablecoin-based settlement and real-time liquidity consolidation across networks and jurisdictions. Five enablers for scaled adoption are discussed: regulatory clarity, redemption reliability, network interoperability, operational readiness and risk management. The paper concludes that tokenised money represents a new capability that, at scale, will require not only modern infrastructure but also a mindset shift and close collaboration between banks, corporates and regulators to ensure these instruments are deployed securely and deliver real economic value. This article is also included in the Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at http://hstalks/business.
Keywords: cross-border liquidity; liquidity management; programmable payments; real-time treasury; stablecoins; tokenised deposits; tokenised money

The European liquidity management landscape is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Once anchored in predictable conventions and stable relationships, the ecosystem now faces a convergence of macroeconomic volatility, sweeping regulatory reform and rapid technological innovation. This paper provides a detailed analytical examination of these shifts, exploring the evolving interdependencies between banks, corporates and payment service providers (PSPs). Key themes include the impact of persistent inflation, fluctuating interest rates and geopolitical uncertainty; the far-reaching effects of regulatory reforms such as the third Capital Requirements Regulation, the Instant Payments Regulation, and the proposed third Payment Services Directive and Payment Services Regulation; and the accelerating adoption of real-time payments, data automation and digital treasury solutions. Through practical examples, operational analysis and actionable recommendations, this paper equips finance professionals, treasurers, bankers and PSPs to navigate the evolving European liquidity management environment and prepare for the challenges and opportunities ahead. This article is also included in the Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at http://hstalks/business.
Keywords: CRR3; IPR; PSD3; PSR; corporate treasury; instant payments; liquidity management; liquidity products from banks; real-time payments

This paper analyses the adoption and evolution of the Czech instant payment system (IPS), focusing on its integration into the Czech Express Real Time Interbank Gross Settlement (CERTIS) system. Since 2018, CERTIS has enabled 24/7 CZK fund transfers, boosting transaction efficiency. Voluntary bank participation led to rapid uptake, and by 2024, IPS-participating banks handled over 90 per cent of CERTIS client transactions, with 50 per cent of interbank retail payments processed instantly. Czechia’s IPS stands out for its seamless bank integration, high reliability and flexible limits. It also outperforms priority payments for lower-value transactions. The paper also examines emerging cyber-security risks linked to instant payments, highlighting how growing fraud threats influence system design, transaction limits and the development of preventive measures. Finally, paper explores future developments, including cross-border payments and links to central bank digital currencies. This article is also included in the Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at http://hstalks/business.
Keywords: CERTIS; instant payment system; real-time settlement; transaction efficiency

This paper provides a data-driven analysis of retail payment behaviour in the euro area, with the aim of informing debate on a possible holding limit for a digital euro. Using data from the European Central Bank (ECB) SPACE 2024 study and the ECB Data Portal, it compares average transaction values for cash, debit cards and e-money across member states, and examines how each payment method is used in everyday practice. The findings reveal that cash usage, while declining in frequency, remains important in retail payments. The average cash transaction value stands at €13.50, but consumers still carry an average of €59 in their wallets and withdraw nearly an average €195 per ATM transaction. This suggests that cash is used both for small purchases and as a form of backup liquidity. There remain significant differences between countries, reflecting cultural preferences and differing levels of digital payment adoption. Importantly, the data show no clear link between cash usage patterns and the size of the shadow economy. Debit cards are the dominant retail payment instrument, with average transaction values falling to €34.82 in 2024, underscoring their increasing importance for everyday spending. Analysis by merchant category highlights a clear split between frequent, low-value payments (such as groceries and restaurants) and less frequent, high-value purchases (such as travel and durable goods). E-money plays a limited role. More than 85 per cent of euro-area e-money transactions take place in just two countries, reflecting market structure rather than widespread consumer use. Finally, the paper shows that changes in payment habits tend to be slow, and that if private instant-payment solutions spread widely before a digital euro is introduced, it is unclear whether a digital euro would replace existing payments. This article is also included in the Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at http://hstalks/business.
Keywords: Average transaction values; CBDC; cards; cash; cash withdrawals; digital euro; e-money; euro area; payment substitution; retail payments; shadow economy; spending per sector