20 May 2025

Happy Birthday, EBA!

Celebrating 40 years of collaboration

 

“As for the future, the task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.”

These words, from the early 20^th century French writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, are more poignant today than ever before. They impart a philosophy that the Euro Banking Association (EBA) shares: to drive progress through practical action, not passive prediction. In doing so, we are laying the groundwork for the future – empowering our members to build on these foundations and continue advancing payments innovation.

That spirit of purposeful action is also what underpins our belief that collaboration beats competition when it comes to building a strong European payments ecosystem. This belief has guided the EBA for four decades and it is also on show at EBAday, which celebrates its 20th birthday this year. This networking powerhouse is attended by the who’s who of the industry – and the latest talent – to spark discussions and forge connections across borders and generations. The people in the room may represent competing employers, yet they and their customers all stand to gain from collaboration in the non-competitive space – where it helps to fight fragmentation and create a level playing field.

In this way, the Association – and the networking opportunities it provides – continues to serve as a space where payment professionals from diverse backgrounds and varying levels of seniority can come together, analyse common challenges, share knowledge and identify solutions. We are committed to ensuring it remains this way for many decades to come.

The EBA: a storied, member-driven legacy

The 1980s were a pivotal period of transformation in Europe, as the Iron Curtain began to lift, and the foundations of European integration were laid. In this spirit of growing political and economic unity in Europe, 1985 marked an important and enduring milestone for the future of payments: the birth of the Euro Banking Association. At that time, a group of payments professionals of 18 commercial banks with the support of the European Commission and the European Investment Bank had a vision for developing and managing the ECU Clearing System. Recognising the need for coordinated action in an increasingly interconnected financial landscape, they established the EBA to take on this vital role.

Working with payment practitioners from across the continent, the EBA has contributed to and provided the platform for a pan-European harmonisation ever since – tackling issues that are not just infrastructure-related, but require broader discussions around market practices, regulatory frameworks, and innovation.

There are many examples of this in action: from providing guidance to ensure the consistent pan-European implementation of PSD and PSD2, to playing a leading role in supporting banks’ migration to the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). We’ve also often been ahead of the curve – as shown by our One-Leg-Out Payment Processing Working Group in 2009 and the Priority Payment Scheme for urgent euro credit transfers in 2008. Over the years, the industry caught up, and those topics have been revisited with fresh urgency.

What has allowed us to consistently support the industry while adapting to its many changes over the years? Often, as organisations mature and grow, they tend to take on a life of their own, and as a result can become distanced from the institutions and individuals they were founded to serve. The EBA’s continued success can be attributed, in part, to the indispensable value it places in its members – continually adapting as an organisation to meet new challenges and better serve their needs.

In simple terms: none of our activity simply falls from the heavens, it comes directly from our members – with their specific challenges shaping our agenda. And they don’t only come to us when they know there’s a problem – they come when they suspect there might be one. A good and very recent example is our work on Verification of Payee, where the EBA has helped assess the impact of the European Union (EU)’s Instant Payments Regulation and identify potential challenges early on.

Four decades of trusted delivery

For these reasons EBA members remain the lifeblood of our work, and our connection to them – and collaboration with them – is pivotal.

This is a position that our members align with. In a recent survey, ‘collaboration’ – alongside ‘networking’ and ‘expertise’ – were cited as the words that our members most associate with the EBA. But to this characterisation I would add the term ‘silo breaker’. Whether we are helping members make sense of regulation, adapt to new technologies, or align with evolving market practices, our true power lies in the ability to bring people together. In order to solve industry-wide challenges, we have broken down silos between stakeholders from different countries, institutions and functions – and even successfully connected colleagues from within the same organisation, who were otherwise unaware they shared a common objective.

This flair for uncovering connections extends beyond the traditional payments remit – and our members increasingly look to us as the voice of the market, on a halo of issues. One of the most significant of these was the guidance we issued on the handling of SEPA Direct Debit (SDD) R-transactions, where our report gave an overview on the different country-specific usage rules in place for SDD reason codes and made recommendations regarding the potential alignment of practices. We also played a role in shaping and harmonising Know Your Customer (KYC) processes. Closely tied to KYC are our payment fraud-related activities, more specifically our Fraud Taxonomy initiative, which – for the first time ever – has enabled a pan-European approach to categorising payments fraud.

When I turn my attention to the future, one of the most significant silos I see on the horizon is that which stands between generations. In order to enable the future of payments – and to ensure the Association remains an invaluable source of support – it is imperative we bridge this divide. That is why we’ve made it a priority to invest considerable resources in educational initiatives; to give the upcoming generation of payments professionals a space to learn from experienced experts. Our interactive EBA Academy, for example, which was launched last year, is already a tremendous success – demonstrating to young professionals the importance and utility of building links across the ecosystem.

The Academy is a natural extension of our mission: to make collaboration second nature – not just for today’s leaders, but for tomorrow’s as well.

Beyond the buzzwords: the EBA as payments' connecting force

It is our firm belief that buzzwords and trends come and go, but the payments ecosystem will always need a reliable, steadfast townhall – a room with plenty of coffee and cookies that we provide – within which challenges can be hashed out and solutions identified.

If we could turn the clock back to 1985, we would be reminded that payments were largely conducted using cash, cheques, and bank transfers. Credit cards were slowly becoming common, though chip-and-PIN technology was yet to be invented. In the decades proceeding – all the way to the rise of instant payments today – the Euro Banking Association has surfed the inexorable wave of technological innovation; not by making bold predictions, but by serving the payments sector with pragmatic, actionable support and guidance.  

We return, then, to the principle that opened this piece: the future shouldn’t be predicted but enabled. Through our member-driven agenda, cross-generational initiatives, and credentials as a silo-breaker, the EBA is helping to shape a payments landscape where collaboration becomes the true catalyst for the next wave of innovation.