The status quo of standardisation in Europe’s cross-border payment systems is hardly satisfactory. There is no doubt that what we require is a simple, that is to say, a standardised, form of access to the national systems within the EU from other countries.
The European central banks, and the banking industry, have shown that it is possible to build bridges in the first instance to link national systems to each other. Bridging standards reduce the national conversion cost to the cost of using this standard instead of a large number of national ones.