22/10/2020  On the edge of a new frontier: European payments in the digital age  SPEECH  On the edge of a new frontier: European payments in the digital age         Keynote speech by Fabio Panetta, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at the ECB Conference “A new horizon for pan-European payments and digital euro” Frankfurt am Main, 22 October 2020  Introduction It is a great pleasure for me to open this conference on the new horizon for European payments.
Here in Belgium, the long drawn out discussions about the country's institutional future have long hampered the formation of a stable government. All this uncertainty has taken its toll on the financial markets; the credit default swap rate for Belgium increased somewhat, compared with Germany's rate.