Tirols and payments. A direct testimony. Gerardo Coppola It is with pleasure that I welcomed the news of the Nobel prize to prof. Jean Tyrol. He works at the prestigious IDEI in Toulouse, a very pleasant French town at the foot of the Pyrenees which I visited for a few days' conference organized by him and by prof. Rochet on credit cards and interchange fees over ten years ago. At the time I was a manager of the Bank of Italy with responsibilities in the payments area and I had been in charge of organizing the payment systems supervisory function created in 1999, pursuant to article 146 of the Consolidated Banking Act.
Modern payment systems for interbank transactions or for payments to households and businesses are a less known area of work of Tirole's scientific activity, but of no less interest for the implications that arise from it. His work has explored essential issues for the functioning of these systems: the formation of prices, the questions inherent to the natural tendency to form monopolies, or why it is important that in some cases central banks manage infrastructures such as Target or promote areas optimal as the Sepa. We are also willing to accept inconsistencies in the governance rules of these systems if they, especially wholesale payment platforms, are functional to the transmission of monetary policy inputs, or to fast and efficient payments such as electronic payments or to the diffusion of settlement circuits worldwide as in the case of debit and credit cards or electronic money.
The complexity of these systems is comparable to telecommunications or network industries such as the Internet with peculiarities such as to impose ad hoc rules to contain their enormous power to violate privacy, create a monopoly or exploit the dominance they can acquire in the social and political life of a village. In this area, Tirole had in my opinion three fundamental merits. Starting from the interbank commission on payment cards, he demonstrated that these circuits are real network industries and as such they set common prices precisely to achieve balances aimed at maximizing social well-being. And therefore Tirole's interests in payments are fully compatible with his more general studies on the economy of competition. Two important points follow from this. Payment systems are the backbone for developing the digital economy, relevant not only for antitrust purposes but also for the containment of systemic risks and for financial stability, especially with regard to infrastructures.
In this sense, the new Nobel Prize is the one who demonstrated why central banks must manage and control payment systems, developing ad hoc policies to improve their efficiency and stability. Significant contributions emerge from Tirole's academic studies, with a clear distance from the optimistic neoclassical visions on the solid functioning of the financial markets and their uninterrupted progress towards the common good. Like studies on gambling finance, the industrial economy or the digital or service economy, as told by Tirole, it gives space to research, new investments and, ultimately, job creation, the more difficult road to trace for Italy and Europe.
For our country, the lesson of Tyrol is still to be learned in terms of greater competition in the field of payments and the resistance emanating from the national banking and financial industry. Evidence of this is the still high commissioning of services, the technological uncertainties that characterize investment policies and, above all, the prospects conditioned by the desire to defend peculiarities and payment instruments made obsolete by the transition to SEPA, such as, for example, postal payment slips and bank receipts.
