As part of the Merchant Payments Coalition Europe, Ecommerce Europe, together with EuroCommerce, EACT, IATA, Independent Retail Europe and SME United, co-signed a joint statement on the digital euro. It underlines the key asks of merchants for the digital currency:
- Compensation model: implement a simple and uniform cap of 4 cents per transaction for the merchant service charge instead of the caps proposed in the regulation.
- Offline wallet: enable offline use of the online digital euro wallet first to save time and cost and support consumer adoption.
- Limit basics and do those first: reduce the list of basic services where possible and launch basic services first, leaving sophisticated use cases (e.g. conditional payments) until later.
- Phasing: do in-store and e-commerce first to make the bulk of payments more resilient as soon as possible.
- Merchant holdings: allow merchants to hold digital euro to make payments to suppliers.
- Reuse infrastructure: implement a single open standardised European payments infrastructure that will benefit all stakeholders, making integration easier and allowing public and private propositions to compete freely.
Merchants play a key role in the development of new payment solutions, let’s make sure our views are considered!
Read the full statement here.