Our Dutch central bank (DNB) holds the secretariat of the socalled National Forum on Payment Systems. Basically a forum where representative groups of providers and customers of payment services meet and discuss relevant developments such as SEPA, safety of payment systems, how to improve efficiency and ergonomic accessibility and regional availability of payments services.
Today DNB sent out the annual report over 2006 of the Forum which contained an 1 MB update on:
- SEPA: it's coming but a lot of details are not clear yet; the work in 2007 will focus on a transition plan for the Netherlands,
- availability of payment services (see also this log-entry): no indications that there are serious problems; just some minor issues that all involved players agreed to solve,
- further improvement of efficiency: smart pinpackages should help out small retailers by providing low cost easy-to-use POS-terminals and fee deals,
- the publication of future reports on fraud characteristics of credit-cards, accessibility guidelines for POS-terminals, further research into cost/benefits of payments.
