The payment services Directive II and competitiveness: The perspective of European fintech companies

Changing regulation and business environment as well as development of information technologies in finance is rapidly modifying the financial services industry. This consequently puts the financial services industry under additional pressure and constant growing competition from the financial sector participants, from large technology companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, from large FinTech companies such as PayPal, Moven, TransferWise, mobile network operators and other existing and potential market players. The implementation of the new EU Payment Service Directive (PSD2), which allows non-financial companies to provide access to financial services for bank customers, is expected to disrupt the financial services industry as we know it, and make traditional financial services providers and banks, in particular, think of new creative business models to remain competitive. In the process of doing this, changing the landscape of payments and creating new risks for banking business. With this study we aim to assess the new EU Payment Service regulation in the context of industry competitiveness. The study is based on the examination of the PSD2 Directive exploring the opportunities as well as the risks that it will bring to this industry in the near future, and the possibilities of cooperation of the financial services industry with financial technology developers. Moreover, we analyse structured data, collected from a questionnaire based on 4 themes of perception of techs on the importance they have on ensuring competitiveness, conducted with European tech companies. Most of the questionnaire participants believe that the Payment Services Directive 2 will promote competitiveness, innovations and development. Moreover, findings show that comparativeness is related mainly to low costs and customer satisfaction. However, it is also shown that high quality of products/services as well as relatively high speed of transactions and security, privacy and risk are also perceived as important.