Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-11-14-Speech-3-338"
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"en.20011114.12.3-338"2
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"Mr President, Parliament has for years demanded that the Commission take action so that consumers’ bank charges in the euro area can be reduced. The current situation, in which for a payment of EUR 100 you may have to pay as much as EUR 23 bank handling charges, cannot be tolerated. Other colleagues, too, have referred to this matter. Besides, at the beginning of next year the problem will only get bigger, when twelve euro area Member States move over to euro cash. Developing the payment system and reducing the costs incurred both by banks and subsequently by consumers is therefore one of the top-priority items on the ‘urgent’ list of our Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs.
I am sure that the Commission will agree with this target we have, but the means to achieve it differ in part from Parliament’s original wishes. Structural problems must not be solved by force. Cross-border bank charges can permanently be reduced only, and indeed only, if we are able to create technical standards for automated handling of payments in the euro area. The current high costs are caused by the fact that payments have to be processed manually. This paper chase, as old as Adam, is costing both time and money.
However, since there is not sufficient consensus in the banking sector so that this kind of technical standard could have been produced, Parliament has in several reports on the matter emphasised the role of the European Central Bank in the development of a payment system. In fact, Parliament did, towards the end of last year, demand that the ECP should assemble a working group of qualified experts in the field, who would be given the task to create a suitable standard. The idea of Parliament was that the group would have carried out the work during this year and a proposal would have been made public before Christmas. In this way, a new standard, binding upon all banks, would factually have existed before the euro zero hour at the turn of the year, after which the commercial banks could have implemented it at their required time schedules. This kind of arrangement would naturally have also given a competitive edge to those financial institutions, which are able to make a transfer to the new system faster than others.
It is regrettable that this was not achieved. Therefore, this time it is unavoidable that we have to read the Commission report, which in all respects truly is not in accordance with Parliament’s original wishes."@en1
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