03 February 2016

EPC: Publication of the summary of the stakeholders workshop on P2P mobile payments

The workshop concurred that a steering committee should be established to start off the relevant ‘Forum’ which will focus on pan-European interoperability in the field of P2P mobile payments and in particular on the set-up of a pan-European standardised proxy lookup (SPL) service.

The first decisions the steering committee would have to make include:

• What kind of Forum should it be? (Informal or formal? Open or restricted membership?) (Note: the majority of workshop participants was in favour of establishing an ‘open’ Forum)
• Who will participate in the Forum? (Eligibility criteria? Volunteers?)
• How will the Forum be organised (Steering committee? Board? Working groups?)
• Who will provide secretariat support to the Forum?
• Who will fund the Forum?
• The setup of a pan-European standardised proxy lookup (SPL) service (including an SPL Rulebook) as the key objective.
• Timelines of next steps & deliverables (project plan).

The ECB representative informed that the steering committee would be invited to provide a first intermediary status report to the June 2016 meeting of the ERPB.

List of comments or issues

• The proposed architecture described in the report of the ERPB Work Group on P2P Mobile Payments does not include payee initiated payments (i.e. only payer initiated payments). This will exclude some existing solutions.
• Other proxies, besides a telephone number, should be taken into account (e.g. email address, social media id., etc.) when designing the setup of pan-European standardised proxy lookup (SPL) service for potential subsequent implementation.
• The ERPB Work Group on P2P Mobile Payments report does not exclude the use of other proxies but rather suggests to start with the mobile telephone number (as a proxy).
• The aim should be to reach pan-European interoperability in the P2P mobile payments area via leveraging existing SEPA infrastructure and existing solutions as much as possible. 
• As a start, minimum requirements could be defined which would not prevent service providers from offering ‘add-ons’.
• It is expected that the business case will be provided by P2M (not P2P) and hence the Forum should also think about what would be the best proxy in the P2M space.
• Having a standardised approach with regard to the polling order of multiple national databases would be critical and hence this should be described in a governance type document.
• What would prevent a payment service provider to connect directly to individual SPL participants instead of using the central hub?
• Could an organisation decide to create its own standardised proxy look-up (SPL) service if it does not agree with the national polling order of the central hub?
• In case a payee has subscribed to multiple services, who will decide to which service the money will be sent? Competitors will not be able to solve this issue amongst themselves. 
• Suggestion to set up a Forum structure that is comparable to the ERPB and where several stakeholder groups are represented.
• Not every sector needs to be represented in the Forum i.e. the scope of the Forum should be clarified prior to making a decision on who should participate.
• A liability regime and a dispute mechanism should be established (e.g. in case a payment is sent to the wrong payee).  
• There is a potential need to review the impact of PSD2 and especially the section related to access to accounts.
• The biggest money transfer organisation in the world is not a bank and the biggest P2P mobile payment service providers are equally not banks (e.g. SEQR, Venmo, Apple Pay ,…). 
• There could be an opportunity to leverage the ISO 12812-4 standard on mobile P2P mobile payments. 

Full summary

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