The Swiss professional quarterly for payment traffic.
December 2011 edition (e-journal)
Table of contents
Editorial by Gabriel Juri, SIX Interbank Clearing
The future of PostFinance is now
After more than 160 years of being a federal institution, the Swiss Post is becoming a corporation. PostFinance, too, becomes an Ltd and comes under the regulatory control of the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority FINMA. Exactly what that means is explained in the following interview with Hans-Rudolf Thönen, member of the PostFinance Board who has been working for the payment traffic provider for almost 40 years. He’s taking both a look back and one ahead: from the evolution of IT from the little yellow payment book right up to today’s technical trends in payment traffic.
Twelve years payment traffic development at BCV
Over the past ten years, the payment traffic sector has undergone some major changes, mostly as a result of the increase in Internet payment orders, resulting in important consequences for banks’ organization and systems. At the Banque Cantonale Vaudoise (BCV) the number of processed orders has doubled since April 1999, while the number of full-time employees assigned to these activities was reduced to one-third.
Cash preferred
The reason why Germans still prefer to pay with cash rather than with credit cards was a mystery to economists until now. A recent Bundesbank study is shedding some light on the phenomenon.
The death knell for the magnetic stripe?
Since Chip and PIN was introduced in Europe, it has been largely accredited for the fall in card present fraud. Latest statistics released by the UK Cards Association, for example, show that fraud losses on UK cards, cheques and online banking have fallen to their lowest levels since the turn of the century.
SIX Group pushing the frontiers of ISO 20022
Implementers of ISO standards traditionally had to rely on their long-established methods for implementing messagestandards-based business processes. With the advent of ISO 20022 and its versatile processing XML-based capabilities, a changing wind has swept new ideas to the fore. As a representative of the financial center, SIX Group is contributing the Swiss perspective to the SWIFT-initiated MyStandards pilot, a sophisticated standards implementation environment.
TARGET2-Securities: No Swiss franc participation
In September, the Swiss National Bank decided to forgo participation by the Swiss franc in the European securities processing system TARGET2-Securities – for now. The decision was preceded by an intensive dialog among the stakeholders.
CLEARIT turns 50
CLEARIT has many initiators: the representatives from Swiss banks as editors in the earliest times and the SIX Interbank Clearing board members in the late 1990s. But without then-CEO André Bamat as the driving force and advocate, the trade journal wouldn’t be where it is today: At 50 issues.
