The official site of Italy's central bank

No. 63 - The new community legal framework for payment services. First remarks

Several factors have given the decisive impulse to the implementation of the Single Euro Payments Area and, more generally, to the final unification of the European payments system: the adoption of the Payment Services Directive, 2007/64/EC, due for transposition into national law by 1st November 2009; the set-up of the new real-time gross settlement system TARGET2, with ECB Guideline ECB/2007/2, of 26 April 2007; the European Payments Council's approval of the Framework on payment cards, the Rulebooks on the new European credit transfer and direct debitschemes and the PE-ACH/CSM Framework, laying down principles for the future Pan-European settlement infrastructures.

This has been the subject of specific in-depth examination within the Project of Research of National Interest on "consumer protection and payment services in the new Community legal framework", approved by the Ministry of University and Scientific Research in the course of 2006 and jointly carried out by the Universities of Siena, Naples, Foggia and the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart - seat of Piacenza, in cooperation with the Bank of Italy, the Italian Bankers' Association and other public authorities.

The present publication is made up of twelve papers and divided into two sections, dedicated to analysing the payment services and the payment systems respectively. It is based on the outcome of the studies carried out so far within the Project of Research and is intended to give an up-to-date overview of the Single Euro Payments Area implementation process.
The nine chapters of the first section are essentially aimed at analysing the harmonised rules on the Pan-European payment services performed via credit transfers, direct debits and cards, albeit without neglecting the evolution trend in cheque payments; in the future, these will in all likelihood remain confined to the domestic market only.

Instead, the three chapters of the second section examine the evolution of payment systems, with special regard to the role of Central Banks in this field. In doing so, this section describes the new Trans-European Automated Real-time Gross settlement Express Transfer system (TARGET2), and gives account of the main changes undergone by the retail payment systems, with a view to expanding them to the exchange and settlement of cross-border payment orders.

The work is accompanied by a CD-ROM containing the main legal sources mentioned in the text.