ECB’s Panetta: Better Form of Global Payments Needed

31 October 2023

By Isabel Teles – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Fabio Panetta on Tuesday said that cross-border payments needed to be improved.

In a blog post on the website of the ECB, a shorter version of which was published as an opinion piece in the FT, Panetta, who is to take over the helm of the Banca d’Italia from 1 November, said that as globalization became more intense, it was necessary to ‘provide a safer and easily accessible alternative that makes global payments cheaper, faster and more transparent.’

‘Despite such spectacular growth, cross-border payments remain prohibitively expensive and sluggish, leaving the most vulnerable behind’, he said.

Domestic payments, on the other hand, were technologically ahead of cross-border payments, he said.

‘Over the past decade, central banks have significantly improved the back-end infrastructure for facilitating payments, thereby fostering the digitisation of domestic payment systems', he said.

Global payments could benefit from ‘the transformative power of digital technologies’, he advised.

‘Interlinking fast payment systems is a promising avenue for reducing costs and increasing the speed and transparency of cross-border payments’, he suggested, adding that it would be necessary to ‘foster cooperation and explore technical solutions while aligning policy interests.’

‘Improving cross-border payments is a complex challenge that requires concerted efforts from both public and private stakeholders’, he said.