Simultaneously, the e-commerce merchant, or online retailer, receives an automatic payment notification that the payment has been completed successfully. While in some European countries, for example in the Netherlands, banks began offering these payment initiation services, in other countries, such as Germany, new providers entered the market. Legally, these third party service providers have been operating in a grey zone.
This holds both for systemic risk caused by interdependencies within the financial system and for risk concentrations arising from interplay between the financial system and the real economy. At the same time, the goal of macroprudential oversight is the early identification of the build-up of financial imbalances so that countermeasures can be taken.