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The European Payments Initiative (EPI) is an initiative backed by 16 European banks and financial services companies to progressively build Wero, a payment solution tailored for Europe. EPI leverages the instant account-to-account payments infrastructure available in Europe to improve efficiency and remove intermediaries in the payment flow. It aims at enabling next-generation payments for consumers and merchants in Europe across all types of retail transactions. EPI will initially support person-to-person (P2P) and person-to-professional (P2Pro) payments, followed by online and mobile shopping payments and then point-of-sale payments.

For some years now there has been a discussion at the European Commission regarding harmonization of online capital formation rules. Today, crowdfunding is regulated at the member state (national) level creating a mish-mash of European regulations that defy the entire concept of a single market - the entire reason the Europe Union was created.

In a survey of 3,000 banking customers around the world, Kantar found that 93% of consumers in China have used neobank services, 50% of Indians, and 32% of Brazilians. However, across Western Europe only a small minority of consumers has opened a neobank account, with the Netherlands and Germany leading with 4% usage, and only 2% of U.S. consumers.ds and Germany lead with 4% usage; France and Spain are lagging with 2% usage In the USA, only 2% of consumers have utilised the services of a neobank"

The Association for Financial Markets in Europe has published a paper setting out five recommendations to deliver supervisory convergence on the regulation of crypto-assets in Europe.

The default of Wirecard highlights several problems in the regulation and supervision of Fintech companies, with regulatory holes in investor protection, customer protection, and financial stability. This column argues that since Fintech companies can be very complex, their oversight requires understanding their business model and combining regulation and supervision based on both entities and activities. The global reach of Fintechs also calls for better coordination at the European level and beyond, but the authors do not see the need for new regulatory body to oversee Fintechs in Europe.

Wirecard's internal numbers reveal that the operating performance of its core business - mainly payments processing in Europe and issuing credit cards in Europe and North America - was far worse than previously known. The figures show that those core activities have also become increasingly lossmaking in recent years, despite accounting for half of the company's reported revenue and almost two-thirds of the transaction volume.

European originations among peer-to-peer (P2P) and marketplace lending platforms soared by 80% in 2019 to €6.6bn, up from €3.6bn the previous year. The data paints the stark difference between the U.K.'s mature lending platforms, which grew a moderate 10.7% to £6.2bn in 2019, and Europe where the market remains in high-growth territory. It also means that Europe appears on the verge of overtaking the UK's P2P and marketplace lending, possibly as soon as 2020, with the combined value of the U.K. and EU figures being worth more than £12bn last year. Unlike the UK market however, nearly half of the European lending volume is dominated by a single player, with Latvian lending marketplace Mintos originating 45% of P2P loans in 2019 worth a combined €3bn. The caveat is that Mintos operates as a kind of "P2P of P2Ps" which inflates its figures.

Blockchain for Europe published a roadmap for the future of payments in a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) oriented European economy. The paper provides an analytical framework dividing the digital payments value chain into three pillars: the contract execution system, the digital payment infrastructure, and the monetary unit. Based on this framework, the authors compare technology platforms, public and private sector payment solutions, including a bridge solution, e-money tokens, and central bank digital currency (CBDC) including "synthetic" CBDC. It concludes that the optimal payment solution for Europe would be a DLT-based euro CBDC but it is unlikely that it will be implemented in the short term, and unclear if it will address all the challenges and needs of the European economy and its consumers.

The Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME) published a paper on decentralized finance (DeFi), including the impact of policy and emerging regulatory proposals within Europe on DeFi regulation and its intersection with capital markets. It calls for further research and global cooperation to determine the appropriate, proportionate, and comprehensive regulatory solutions for the unique challenges posed by DeFi. In that regard, it is crucial to leverage existing processes and frameworks to create a holistic regulatory perimeter.

The Council of the European Union Permanent Representatives Committee approved the legal text for its  Markets in Crypto Asset Regulation (MiCA), marking a significant step in the journey towards a fully authorized and regulated crypto-asset market in Europe. The European Parliament's Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs will now vote to pass the final text on October 10, before a date is decided for the implementation of the regulation

"In our overview of open banking in Europe, we look at what open banking really means in Europe relative to the rest of the world and caveat that its evolution into open finance is more than just about expanded scope. We then justify our choice to focus on the Netherlands, France, Spain and Switzerland instead of on Europe's top-four open banking performers of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and the UK."

"The European Commission and the Association of German Banks, in cooperation with Roland Berger and more than 20 high-profile partners from the private sector, industry, the financial sector and the digital industry, have produced the report on the "Tokenise Europe 2025" initiative."

Facebook's proposed digital currency, Libra, will cause immediate tax problems for users in Europe that will hamper its mainstream adoption, according to leading tax lawyers. The tax problem stems from Facebook's idea to peg the value of Libra to a basket of currencies globally rather than fix it in value against its users' domestic currency.

PayPal launched Xoom-its international money transfer service-in 32 markets across Europe.

The Financial Supervisory Authority of Iceland approved Reykjavik-based Monerium as its first electronic money institution in June. The designation means that Monerium has regulatory approval to provide fiat payment services on a blockchain and use it throughout the European Economic Area. Electronic money is a well-established regulatory framework in Europe that's been in use for years.

According to Jan Krahnen and Katja Langenbucher the Wirecard scandal is a wake-up call alerting German politics to the importance of securities market integrity. A fundamental overhaul of the European fragmented securities markets supervisory regime offers the potential to lead to the establishment of an independent European Single Market Supervisor (ESMS). Endowed with strong enforcement powers, and supported by the existing national agencies, the ESMS would be entrusted with ensuring a uniform market standard as to transparency and other issues of market integrity across Europe. This would not rule out maintaining a variety of market organization structures at the national level. The ESMS would need executive powers in the world of markets (i.e. securities and trading), much like the ECB Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM). To fill this new role, ESMS would have to be established as a new, independent institution, including an enormously scaled up staff compared to the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA).

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is expanding its BIS Innovation Hub with the establishment of new Hub centres across Europe and in North America in cooperation with member central banks. In the next two years, the BIS will open centres in collaboration with the Bank of Canada (Toronto), the Bank of England (London), the European Central Bank/Eurosystem (Frankfurt and Paris) and four Nordic central banks (Danmarks Nationalbank, the Central Bank of Iceland, the Central Bank of Norway and Sveriges Riksbank) in Stockholm. The BIS will also form a strategic partnership with the Federal Reserve System (New York).

According to Finch Capital's 8th Annual State of European Fintech Report, European fintech companies secured only EUR 4.6 billion in funding in H1 2023, versus the EUR 15.8 billion raised during the same period in 2022. The deal count in H1 2023 dropped 48% to 463. The massive drop was mainly driven by a decreased number of mega rounds, a retreat in activity from American investors, and a return to investment fundamentals.

This column introduces the available stablecoins and discusses the possible impact of the forthcoming Markets in Crypto-assets regulation by the European Commission on e-money issuers. The authors argue that the regulation may spur regulatory arbitrage in Europe and lead commercial banks to offer tokenised deposits on the decentralised ledger of a public blockchain.

The Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME) published a response to a call for submissions from the European Commission (EC) Directorate-General for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union (DG FISMA) on any issues and opportunities relating to the deployment of DLT based infrastructure and services in the European Union (EU) that may merit the EC's attention. AFME's overarching view is that a transformative potential of DLT is that can enable companies and individuals to access a shared, peer-validated database as a single-source-of-truth, without the need to centralize data and transaction processing with a single actor. This increases accessibility by participants, data security and immutability, and data transparency in the real economy. Innovation in finance plays a key role in this vision, which will only begin in earnest with the updating of capital markets infrastructure.