One cause of this can be seen, for example, in the fact that banks mutually attend to credit customers and to large-value payments between third countries (such as Japan and Hong Kong). But this variety of relationships may lead to a complicated liquidity management and high costs.
European cross-border retail payments could almost be said to be still in the “Middle Ages”: they are characterised by high fees, long execution times and very little transparency. This situation led to the EU Directive on cross-border credit transfers (Transparency Directive) coming into force early 1997, the outcome of which has, up to now, regrettably been mediocre.