Actually, payment initiation services provided by third parties have existed in the market for some time now. They have been emerging in parallel with e-commerce, i.e. online shopping, offering an alternative to established payment instruments and services that were – understandably – neither conceived nor wholly suitable for the e-commerce environment.
In contrast to the years preceding the crisis, when household borrowing was growing at a pace far above that of gross domestic product (GDP), it has since come down and is now growing more slowly than the economy overall (figure 3).