A NEW DAUGHTER IS COMING: PSD2 IN TURKEY
Payment service consumers, i.e. all Turkish citizens and businesses, are called to familiarize themselves quickly and definitively with two important innovations, which they hear more and more frequently about: the Implementation of Second European Directive on payment (PSD2) on Turkey and Open Banking.
The path is still long, but consumers need to know more, because they are innovations built with the aim of benefiting them.
Here we give brief references, also as regards the history of our country on delays to be filled in digital services.
LAW NO:6493 IS THE MOTHER, PSD2 UPDATE IS THE DAUGHTER
The Second European Payment Services Directive, called PSD2, is part of banking regulation policies that aim to increase competition, innovation and security on the market for these services.
Approved by the Turkish Parliament in the end of 2019, the new regulation aims to hit the monopoly of banks on these markets, replacing the previous provision, which has the merit of having created a single payments market.
Today there are five payment transactions on which there is an absolute identification unit: wire transfers, direct debits, payment cards (credit and debit cards), bank checks (already standardized) and cash. (Of course, crypto is coming also 🙂 )
With the statistics referring to these instruments, the characteristics of each national system and the progress towards the digital currency are measured, considered the most efficient and secure form of payment. The cash, however, remains perfectly legitimate, even if it must be considered economic and social costs, to establish the relationship of convenience and legality with traceable payment methods.
With the same legislation, new intermediaries such as payment and electronic money institutions have been provided, while with the Law On Payment And Securities Settlement Systems, Payment Services And Electronic Money Institutions of 2013 (Payment Services Law), the case of the payment account and the basic accounts has been detailed, to be offered at preferential prices. to the poorest citizens, to encourage their social inclusion.
For details on the payment account, please refer to the article on the Payment Account (12), noting that this is still an unknown tool for the general Turkish public, given the almost total absence in the catalogs of products offered by banks.
In order to understand the new updates, we first have to know PSD2.
THE PSD2 IN PILLS
PSD2 obliges banks and other financial intermediaries to give access to consumer accounts (both private and business) also to third-party service providers, on the basis of clear rules that apply both to existing intermediaries and to new service providers.
The main objectives of PSD2 are:
- a more efficient and integrated European payments market, offering consumers greater choice and greater transparency of the services offered
- greater competition between banks and new intermediaries
- safer payments
- greater consumer confidence through robust rules to protect their data
- better pricing of payment services.
With this regulatory framework, PSD2 requires banks to review their business models in depth. Impacts are also expected on the large networks that issue and manage debit and credit cards.
NEW INTERMEDIARIES ARE COMING
With the law update in Turkey, these new entities are classified as PISP, i.e. payment initiation service providers and as AISP, i.e. account information service providers.
On the unavoidable condition of obtaining the prior and explicit consent of customers:
- PISPs can initiate payments directly from customer accounts;
- AISPs can access the data to offer the customer an aggregate view of all accounts held at different banks, in order to allow them better management of resources, using a single application (for example on smartphones).
Below is a schematic representation of the disintermediation that PISP and AISP will produce in traditional relationships between banks and customers. In particular, the PISPs will be able to disintermediate the acquirer bank, but also the subjects operating in the processing of the transactions, as well as the payment card networks (in black in the scheme).
The AISP will instead enter between the bank and the customer to collect and process all the information relating to the transactions carried out with all the banks with which he maintains an account.
Source : Open Banking, Strategic Research
The Personal Data Protection Law (KVKK and GDPR) supports the push towards these technological-financial innovations, requiring that customers be made aware in a concise and transparent manner of how their data is used and who, even if expressly authorized, will draw on you.
Some more recent phenomena can be identified in the Turkish payment market.
The first is the entry of electronic money institutions promoted by large entities, unlike the period in which the first Community directive was in force, during which the authorized payment institutions were small in size, mostly engaged in the processing of non-innovative tools, such as postal bulletins.
The delays accumulated in the 2010-20 decade on the front of a more innovative and differentiated offer kept the country among the European backguards. In recent times they have created specialized structures both banks and non-banks, opening up new development prospects for digital payments.
Another element of novelty is given by the first AISP and PISP promoted by both banks and other operators (usually developers or IT service providers), who can introduce important technological innovations and new business models falling under the FinTech category.
Finally, new infrastructures such as the Fintech District and aggregation poles for start-ups are born, aimed at promoting widespread research and new applications.
WHAT IS OPEN BANKING
Open banking is the term that identifies financial services as part of financial technology (Fintech) which refers to the use of open applications called APIs (Appication Programming Interface), which third parties can develop to build new services around an institution. financial.
Open Banking originates when the Competition and Market Authority (CMA-UK) begins to deepen the theme of the offer of retail banking services to families and small and medium-sized enterprises, concluding with the need to improve the degree of competition in these markets. Many changes were introduced from 2016 onwards, until Open Banking entered into force as a regulatory factor for the UK market in 2018 .
The CMA has established an obligation for the nine major British banks, known as the CMA9 (HSBC, Barclays, RBS, Santander, Bank of Ireland, Allied Irish Bank, Danske Bank, Lloyds, and Nationwide) to apply the recommendations developed by the Open Banking Working Group, appointed by the Government. Today the CMA manages, among other things, the IT environment for testing new applications, with free and free access to all, for the experimentation / simulation (sandbox) of relations between financial intermediaries and FinTech companies.
Building on the English Open Banking Directory and the European Directives of PSD2 and GDRP, other national jurisdictions are adopting their versions of Open Banking in the form of regulation or as market guidelines. Finally, Turkish Parliament has accepted the relevant legislation.
It is believed that the impact of Open Banking on the business models of the payment and financial industry in general may be similar to that of Apple with its Apple Store in 2008. It has given consumers the opportunity to choose applications whatever they want. (Each has a profile differentiated from the others, according to their preferences.)
Changes in consumer behavior, regulatory changes, competitive search for new business models and the threat of platforms like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are pushing banks to take the obligatory path of Open Banking.
It represents a paradigmatic change in the ways in which financial services are distributed along the value chain, and the use of API constitutes the backbone of the technological framework, giving FinTech companies, banks and other intermediaries to create new services through customized financial management applications. The recognized value of this trend is that the consumer of financial services can act in a more informed way in making use / investment decisions regarding their financial resources.
With Open Banking in Turkey, the data relating to accounts and transactions no longer belong to the bank or financial intermediary but to the account holder and what is even more important will be the choices made by consumers to shape the offer of financial services and the methods of data sharing.