One does not have to be a clairvoyant to see that digitalisation, open banking, PSD2 and instant payments will be high on the industry’s agenda in 2017. Consequently, these topics will feature prominently in the programme of next year’s EBAday and of the Summer and Winter School that the EBA will organise throughout the year to give participants fresh ideas and a broad insight into existing and anticipated challenges regarding these subject matters.

As a thought leader in payments and related transaction services, the Euro Banking Association (EBA) has been digging into all of these topics for quite a while through several of its work streams. The Association will feed the latest results and conclusions from its analytical and educational work into the conference sessions, together with the experts it has been cooperating with in working groups and fora.

In November 2016, the EBA launched a Practitioners’ Panel to foster an exchange on PSD2-related implementation issues at a pan-European level. This new discussion platform focuses on practical questions that account-servicing payment service providers (AS-PSPs) are faced with in their implementation activities for achieving PSD2 compliance.

The need for a platform where PSD2 implementation issues can be identified and, where possible, solved had been strongly voiced in an EBA membership survey on PSD2 impact areas, which the EBA’s PSD2 task force conducted over the summer to get an up-to-date picture of the practical pain points identified by AS-PSPs. The work of this task force, including the results of the survey, were published as a Report and have been fed into the agenda of the PSD2 Practitioners’ Panel.

At the same time, the EBA kicked off an Open Forum on Open Banking, a place for banks, Fintechs and other stakeholders to exchange their views and experiences on the strategic implications and opportunities around the PSD2 Access-to-the-Account provisions and the creation of an Open Banking ecosystem. Digitalisation is changing the financial ecosystem, enabling many possibilities to improve financial services. Open Banking is seen as the logical next step for the payments industry to deliver better value to customers through enhanced services based on new co-operation models involving different market players. Given the diversity of existing and new players, the industry’s evolution towards Open Banking can only benefit from a broad, Europe-wide dialogue: one objective of this exchange is to identify areas where collaborative action at a pan-European level could be beneficial or even necessary to avoid any market fragmentation that could negatively affect customer experience.

EBAday 2017 will feel the pulse of progress made on the agendas of both new groups. And given the relevance of their topics, this prospect makes EBAday one of the most exciting industry events in 2017 to look forward to.