Way forward from card payments
Ten years or so after the start of the huge expansion of credit and debit cards in Greece, the country seems to have locked on the use of “plastic money,” lagging behind the modern trends of electronic payments.
That regards instant payments, which is nothing but a way of paying from account to account (A2A), a trend that is spreading rapidly both in Europe and around the world, as it is cheaper and also European-made.
This new trend is sought to be promoted by the merger of the three direct payment systems, similar to the Greek IRIS, jointly launched by three Mediterranean countries – Spain, Portugal and Italy – so that citizens can transfer money without cost, expanding at the cross-border level the possibility of direct payments.
In this way, just as today a European citizen can travel across Europe and use his cellphone SIM card to connect to other telephone companies, he will also be able to make use of the interoperability of the respective systems promoted by the three Southern countries and make electronic payments. Portugal’s SIBS Business Development Director Luis Sequeira extended an “open invitation” to Greece to join this initiative last week.
