Within the framework of the ITU Regional Initiative for Europe on Innovation, Youth and Entrepreneurship (adopted by the World Telecommunication Development Conference 2014, Dubai), ITU co-organized the 2nd Digital Payments Summit, that addressed all issues related to digital payment services' landscape and followed the extensive dialogue released by the 1st Athens Digital Payments Summit. This summit was held on 25 - 26 May 2016 in Athens, Greece. It gathered more than 100 European stakeholders working on fostering innovation in field of financial services empowered by the ICT solutions.
The complete disruption of commerce-including form factors such as beacons, tokens, clouds and operating system POS solutions-, has led to the launching of a wide range of mobile payments and wallet initiatives by an even wider range of Banks, Retailers, Payment Networks, Mobile Network Operators, OEMs and Internet and Technology companies given new growth opportunities, as well as to a whole new set of trends for the Banking sector, including constantly connected consumers, open platforms in bank infrastructure, the role of mobile and social channels, regulatory reform and the emerging importance of the millennial generation.
As far as the Legal and Regulatory field is concerned, Regulators have to deal with numerous and considerable challenges in order to keep up with the aforementioned changing technologies, increasing costs for most stakeholders on the one hand but creating opportunities for innovators on the other. A brand new era also arises for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, as technology-led innovation is redefining every single aspect of payments and financial services, with large organizations re-evaluating their core strategies, product roadmaps and partnership structures, and start-ups entering the ecosystem with radically new models (supported by unprecedented levels of investment, political agendas and accelerator and similar programs). Another field of change comes along with the FinTech communities, creating the need to explore how existing payments and financial service providers can effectively work with FinTech communities to help catalyse the new product development process, solve infrastructure challenges and deliver new front-end applications and interfaces.
