The Dutch National Bank (DNB) has published its Payment Strategy 2022-2025.
The strategy has three priorities:
Ensuring access to payments
Maintaining a robust and reliable payment structure
Strengthening European and global payments, leveraging the Dutch experience.
Research show that the population has, on the whole, a high regard for payment services at the moment. Having said that, some groups, particularly some of the elderly, people with functional impairments or those with low literacy levels, have noticed a decline.
The DNB will research the problems these groups face and use the National Forum on the Payment System to reverse this decline. The recently announced Covenant, see below, with the banks and other cash cycle stakeholders is an important part of ensuring that cash remains sufficiently available.
One area of concern is making sure that, in the event that there is a failure of digital systems, of credible fallback option, particularly for debit card payments. The strategy calls on market parties to do more in this area.
A connected area is the risks associated with cybercrime attacks. Cyber resilience is to be given high priority. The Netherlands already has a test regime, TIBER tests, to understand if systems and infrastructure are resilient. These tests will be extended to include third parties who have a systemic role. Information sharing will receive a greater emphasis.
Across Europe and online there remain gaps in the ability to pay with all debit cards. While the ability to do this will benefit the internal European market, it would also reduce dependence on US and Asian payment card companies, which do not necessarily offer consumers the protection of European law.
Separately the DNB is an active participant in the ECB’s exploration of a digital euro.
The DNB is an active participant in the G20’s work to improve international payments. Stablecoins could be part of the solution to faster, cheaper and more-inclusive cross-border payments. At the moment stablecoins require better regulation to ensure they are adequately covered by the currencies to which they are linked. The DNB wants to ensure that the global regulations have as few differences as possible.
The President of the DNB, Klaas Knot, is chairman of the Financial Stability Board, which is co-ordinating and promoting international standards for the regulation of global stablecoins.
The DNB has signed a Cash Covenant lasting, in principle, five years to ensure that cash can continue to function properly as a means of payment at the point of sale.
The Covenant has been agreed by 23 organisations involved in the Dutch payment system – banks, the Dutch Payments Association, representatives of consumers, retailers, hospitality and petrol stations and providers of cash services.
It covers areas relevant to the availability and accessibility of cash, such as the number of ATMs, cash service fees (fixed until mid-2023), the fallback options should electronic payments fail etc.
In addition, a new study will be undertaken to explore how the public interest in cash is best safeguarded in the long term. The study will take about 10 months and the results will be reported by the Minister of Finance to the House of Representatives.
