Splitting a bill with friends at a restaurant, paying back half a household bill to your partner, urgently sending money to your child studying in another European country: these are just some of the examples of the convenient uses of mobile Person-to-Person (P2P) payments. The EPC’s work in this area aims to contribute to the interoperability of European mobile P2P payment solutions in order to make the act of paying ever more convenient and easy for increasingly mobile European citizens.
Mobile P2P payments (transactions between two individuals made using a mobile device) are a topic of growing interest in the financial and telecoms industries. With the advent of instant payments in Europe – notably the EPC’s SEPA Instant Credit Transfer scheme – they will become even more popular, as they will allow the easy and immediate transfer of money.
Many mobile payment solutions are limited to a national, sometimes even an intra-bank level, often making it impossible for one person to pay another using a mobile if the two individuals use solutions that are based in two countries or use two different service providers.
To contribute to the pan-European cooperation of mobile P2P payment solutions, the ERPB invited the EPC to facilitate a dialogue.
The creation of Single Euro Payments Area Proxy Lookup (SPL) scheme goes back to June 2015 where, following the publication of the report and recommendations of the ERPB on P2P payments, the EPC organised a stakeholder workshop which attracted over 80 participants from across Europe. One of the main conclusions from the workshop was the need to establish a Mobile Proxy Forum (MPF) with the goal of setting up an interoperability framework and a pan-European SPL service to address the recommendations agreed upon by the ERPB.
The SPL scheme covers the exchange of the data necessary to initiate payments between proxy-based mobile payment solutions on a pan-European level and to facilitate interoperability. It is important to note that the scheme is limited to a lookup function with the sole purpose of initiating a payment.