These developments, however, have raised various issues related to the requirements for bank openness, customer security, transparency and trust in the payment services market as well as consumer rights protection. Consequently, the regulators have to adopt appropriate legislative framework that supports digitalization, innovation and competition, but also take care of security and protection. In this context, it can be noticed that the European Union is a global leader in this domain. By revising the Payment Services Directive (PSD2), the European Union enables stronger competition and 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  innovation by allowing entrance of FinTech payment service providers that will eventually lead to greater choice and better prices for consumers, it will fosters cyber resilience of the payment service providers as well as enhance protection of payment services users. In this way, the European Union created a sound legal framework for digitalized payments landscape that enhances the integration of the single payment. At the same time, it sets an example for other countries around the world how to support digitalization trends by balancing between innovation and competition, on the one hand, and security and protection, on the other hand. The new regulatory framework implies that banks will no longer only be competing against banks, but everyone offering financial services, i.e. the customers will be able to create a set of providers of different financial services instead of relining on one bank for all services.
In this context, the largest retail payment system in the Republic of Macedonia established a Guarantee Scheme in 2017 which is in accordance with the regulation of the National Bank of the Republic of Macedonia that aims to effect the same-day settlement and thus, minimize the liquidity risk in the important payment system in case of a participant default. Furthermore, we also engaged in facilitating cross-  border payments in euro in 2017 by establishing a link between our RTGS payment system MIPS and TARGET2, which relies on the highly appreciated cooperation with Bank of Italy. And we do not stop here. Our recent efforts have been focused on building a Strategy for reducing the cash usage and thus, increasing the digitalization and cashless payments, which 2/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  is a joint project of the central bank, the Ministry of Finance and the banking community. During the following three days, the lecturers will address all the above relevant developments in the payment market. The conference agenda includes a variety of interesting topics, including the European payment landscape and legislation with a special focus on PSD2, instant payments, T2 & T2S consolidation project, collateral management system, recent work of CPMI and latest trends in central bank oversight. This year’s agenda also covers themes related to cryptocurrencies, central bank digital currencies and distributed ledger technology and cyber resilience.