In Italy the construction sites of financial and credit reforms are always at work. But what is really happening on our markets at the dawn of SEPA and the Banking Union?
Let's try to imagine it with the help of the time series on payment services from 2000 to 2013 which were published on the ECB website in early September 2014 and which refer to all the countries that make up the EU, even if three countries predominate with an overall market share of almost 60% of the total: namely Germany, the UK and France.
FAMILIES AND BUSINESSES
Payment services to households and businesses grew strongly in the XNUMXs despite the various crises; in thirteen years the number of transactions doubles, from 51 billion in 2000 to 100 billion in 2013; in detail, at the end of 2013, transactions with payment cards (including those with electronic money) totaled 45 billion, wire transfers 27 billion and direct debits 24 billion, while bank cheques, which are among the instruments that will only be valid domestic level, they have been reduced to just over 4.
The greatest growth belongs to transactions with payment cards, passed in the period from 13 to 45 billion. It follows that the countries that are leaders in the card market are also leaders in the entire payments industry. These trends are typical not only of Europe, but also of the countries of North America: together these two areas represent two thirds of the planet's transactions and those with payment cards.
EUROPE
In evaluating in dynamic terms what happened in the period considered on our continent, we can group the 27 EU countries into four categories.
In the first we find the three countries already mentioned of Germany, France and the UK, which together reached, in 2013, 58 billion transactions against 36 billion ten years earlier with almost equal shares between them. They are the true undisputed leaders and it is interesting to note that the UK and France maintain a significantly high share of checks, albeit decreasing; the UK went from 2,5 billion in 2001 to just under a billion, France from 4,3 to 2,5 billion. In terms of market shares, the three leading nations lose a few points to the advantage above all of the countries of the second group which had very low levels at the beginning of the century. Basically, the decrease in the shares of the leading countries is due to the rapid enlargement and redistribution of the market for new countries to enter the competitive arena.
Il second group in fact, it includes outsider countries that enter the market late compared to those in the first category, but noticeably accelerate their operations, so much so that they go from just 6 to more than 21 billion transactions overall within a few years. They are: Spain (+4 billion), Holland, Poland and Finland (each with +3 billion), and Sweden with more than 2 billion.
With equally noteworthy results are noted Belgium, Denmark, Portugal and Austria, with a variation of approximately one billion transactions each.
At the end of 12, the 2013 European countries of the two groups just examined accounted for almost all the transactions of small amounts: 85% of the EU total.
Al third grouping belong to 14 countries: the small ones of the euro (Cyprus, Malta, Greece, Luxembourg, Estonia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Finland) and the countries of the former Soviet bloc that have really negligible values (Latvia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania and the Republic Czech). Together they make up around 10% of the transactions that take place in EU countries.
ITALY
In the fourth group there is only Italy, a country which is worth 12% of the whole area in terms of GDP, but which weighs very little in the market of advanced transactions with just 4,5% of the total in 2013, even down compared to 2001 when it scored 6%. In absolute terms, the performance is disappointing, going from 3 billion transactions to 4,5, and moreover with around 1 billion of these represented by instruments that are not SEPA compliant, such as postal payment slips, cheques, bank receipts, i.e. with a lower degree of standardization and traceability.
If Italy had the same weight in the sector as its GDP, the number of non-cash transactions would rise to a good 12 billion a year, with undoubted benefits for the whole community.
These are the numbers that give rise to various considerations.
Of this asphyxiated banking services market in our country a non-trivial number of authorities deal with (but surely we have forgotten some of them) a continuous profusion of behavioral rules, not always aligned and often contradicted, inspired by a vast plurality of objectives: transparency, monitoring of payment systems , prudential supervision, confidentiality, competition, consumer protection, the fight against money laundering, terrorism, corruption and tax evasion.
The categorical imperative underlying these sectoral rules is the golden rule KYC - Know Your Customers. Yet the payment transactions are always the same: just over three billion in the last fifteen years.
In the future, the evolution of the species of controls will be enriched by a further link in the scale of regulatory harshness: the limits on interchange fees on debit and credit card transactions (the interchange fees subject to a forthcoming EU Regulation), which are been requested during the semester of the Italian presidency of the Union and accepted by the major international circuits. The introduction of administered prices (0,2% for debit cards, 0,3% for credit cards on transaction volumes) risks being offset by the growth of other price components of electronic payments paid by final consumers , interrupting the hard-won path of growth of electronic transactions.
Further heavy taxes are foreseen and obviously further checks presumably always on the same operations.
So here is the trilogy that has been firmly blocking our country for some time in terms of governance: the maximum of controls on a meager number of operations of an economic/financial system which, on the other hand, according to the statistics of international organizations, produces one of the highest levels of corruption and tax evasion in the world!
RENEWING IS A DUTY
What to do with this bleak picture? Try to imagine the future. As in the famous novel by Pirandello "The wheelbarrow", in which the protagonist invents the game of the wheelbarrow with his dog to overcome the obvious and irreversible dissatisfaction with reality that no longer satisfies him, in short, an enormous effort of surreal imagination.
In addition to discussing reforms of cooperative credit, popular banks and bad banks, let's also try to imagine which bankers and controllers we would like: a bit like taking Pirandello's wheelbarrow for a walk. Others, in other countries, have already done so and have preferred to have an electronic bank rather than a bank with a cash counter that is always open.
Renewing is a duty to shrug off the reputation of an opaque economy, a source of inefficiencies and therefore costly and risky for institutions, intermediaries and, above all, for citizens.
And if we really want to address the issues in terms of governance, our invitation is to systematically consult the archive of crimes and penalties, i.e. the "sanctions applied to bankers" from the site www.bancaditalia.it, so much so that we, as consumers, can have a motto that is easy to translate: KYB, i.e. Know Your Bankers!
And, again to say it with Pirandello, "it is not possible to admit that I am joking for just a moment"!
