Takeaways From CB Forum 2021

The CB Forum is organised by Cartes Bancaires. If you are not familiar with the name, CB is a French company founded in 1984 and, as a French scheme, it defines card payment ways and means (physical and card-not-present)

For the 2021 event, their underlying theme was of course the current Covid-19 crisis, how France and the payment industry have coped, what has changed, what has been learned, and what comes next as we all step into a very different-looking future. Let’s dive right in!

Everyone knows that payments via card are booming as opposed to cash payments. Contactless has become a new habit, and now represents 57% of all physical payments. The contactless limit was even raised to 50 euro in the early stage of the crisis in 2020. No one can deny this pervasiveness of card payments in our very digital world, something that will see further acceleration by the advent of the “Metaverse”. 

As such, what remains on top of the industry’s agenda is security and fraud management. According to Philippe Laulanie, Director General of CB, this is the priority over innovation, even though the CB scheme is a strong innovation engine for payment in France. 

New payment offers are in fact emerging fast, inducing complexity in payments. The number one challenge, according to Pierre Chassigneux, Director of Projects at CB, is service availability. Business resilience must be a top priority - something we can certainly relate to at Okay!

The aim of the European Payment Initiative (EPI) is to offer a payment alternative in Europe (which really just translates to an alternative to US schemes). But such a goal sits a bit at an intersection of two opposing directions. One the one hand, this is a unique opportunity to regain leadership in payment vis-à-vis US schemes and even GAFAs. But on the other hand,  it also needs to gather more momentum amongst European countries to reach any type of functional scale - something that is a big priority according to Martina Weimert, Director General of EPI. 

The PSD2 SCA deployment was successful, with 95% of flows now being covered by SCA in France. Julien Lasalle, who heads the surveillance of all non-cash types of payment at Banque de France, says that the challenge is now to manage new cases. Whether till-less shops or multi-channel purchases, you need to start physically and finish on-line, or vice and versa. In the latter case, the question is how to manage SCA so that an end-user does not have to authenticate twice. Food for thoughts for a company like ours!

While fraud has gone down, it does still exists and always will. And it is identity fraud that is even more important to consider than ransomware attacks, explains General Eric Freyssinet. Why? Because of the way it targets credit. Sadly, identity fraud was exacerbated by the crisis, and all countries are (or should be) working on digital identity programmes. 

France has taken a different route than what we know here in the Nordics (bank-id) when it comes to digital identities programmes. Valérie Peneau, Director of the French Digital Identity Programme, says that a new national card with a chip and an app will be available at the beginning of 2022, with a target of 3 million cards distributed, then a yearly trend of 7 to 8 million cards. French citizens will be able to authenticate with an app and a memorable secret pin. 

It is fair to say that many services will be created from this, and will also eventually penetrate our every day’s lives. If we just take a look at Bank-ID, you can see how it is used several times a day.

All in all, we are incredible thankful for the opportunity to attend such an event, filled with innovation, brilliant minds, and numbers - particularly what we are seeing when it comes to the increase in contactless payments (6 billion in 2021)!

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