Initially, many believed that these innovations would allow more retail and smaller-value transactions to be made electronically, paralleling the move to electronic funds transfer for large-value payments. Of course, substantial investments were needed to provide the infrastructure for using these types of payment devices and to ensure that enough consumers and merchants would use them to make the investments worthwhile.
Inflation has fallen short of the ECB’s medium-term inflation goal of below, but close to, 2% since the beginning of 2013. But recently, with the fading of the declines in energy prices that restrained inflation, headline inflation has moved up quite sharply.