IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aza/jpss00/y2008v2i3p250-258.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Reducing payment processing costs: Scale economies and SEPA

Author

Listed:
  • Bolt, Wilko

    (Senior Economist, Dutch Central Bank, The Netherlands)

  • Humphrey, David

Abstract

The drive towards a single euro payments area (SEPA) is to make cross-border payments just as easy as domestic payments. While this can be achieved by processing the (currently small) volume of cross-border transactions at existing processing centres, costs would be largely unchanged. Alternatively, owing to strong scale economies in processing electronic payments, costs can be markedly reduced if national level processing centres in Europe are consolidated across borders. Estimates of payment scale economies from different sources are presented and potential cost reductions in unit cost are illustrated. The average cost of a payment transaction could fall by upwards of 30 per cent if consolidation doubled processing volume.

Suggested Citation

  • Bolt, Wilko & Humphrey, David, 2008. "Reducing payment processing costs: Scale economies and SEPA," Journal of Payments Strategy & Systems, Henry Stewart Publications, vol. 2(3), pages 250-258, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:aza:jpss00:y:2008:v:2:i:3:p:250-258
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://hstalks.com/article/2469/download/
    Download Restriction: Requires a paid subscription for full access.
    File URL: https://hstalks.com/article/2469/
    Download Restriction: Requires a paid subscription for full access.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    payment scale economies; European payments; SEPA;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G2 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services
    • E5 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aza:jpss00:y:2008:v:2:i:3:p:250-258. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Henry Stewart Talks (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.