Joint European Central Bank-Banca d’Italia conference

These papers should be original and clearly focus on digital retail payments, by covering at least one of the following three related themes:

Theme 1: Digital transformation of retail payments – instant payments, payment initiation services, mobile payments and digital wallets

• Economic effects and the impact on traditional retail payment business models of payment infrastructures, schemes and service providers

• User expectations and the adoption of innovative payment solutions

• Impact of instant payments on service providers and customers (e.g. in terms of settlement risk or liquidity management)

• Impact of regulatory changes (in particular the implementation of the second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) and payment initiation services) on incumbent retail payment service providers and new competitors

Theme 2: Transformation fostered by technological innovation – distributed ledger technologies, virtual currencies and evolution of correspondent banking

• Potential impact of distributed ledger technologies in general – and restricted versus unrestricted networks in particular – on the payment market structure and business models (e.g. traditional correspondent banking and cross-border payments, centralised payment infrastructures and legacy financial telecommunication networks) and the associated challenges

• The future of digital currencies (central bank-issued digital currencies, developments in the field of virtual currencies)

Theme 3: Challenges and opportunities of digitalisation

a) Innovation, competition and interoperability

• Role played by FinTechs in increased competition and innovation in retail payments

• Cooperation versus competition and interoperability in the field of digital payments (e.g. anti-trust and business implications, timing and market concentration considerations for authorities)

b) Compliance, security and privacy

• Potential of FinTech and “RegTech” innovations to meet anti-money laundering and know your customer requirements and effectively prevent fraud

• Cyber security challenges, cyber resilience of retail payment infrastructures, quantum computing and cryptography

• Role of trust in end-user acceptance of digital payments

• Use of big data and social networks for retail payments (e.g. targeted marketing, data privacy)