Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 March 2019
The aim of this contribution is to illustrate the evolution of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) as a form of European hybrid governance. The hybridity of SEPA is found in the interaction between traditional hard law, soft law and privately produced rules. The public and private systems of rules – public in the form of European directives and regulations and private in the form of multilateral agreements among payment service providers (SEPA Rulebooks) – coexist and mutually shape the structure of the European payments system. These two systems of rules have formally been produced within independent rulemaking processes and by discrete rule-makers – public and private respectively. However, public actors have exercised a considerable amount of influence over the private rules. They have done so through informal yet systematized interactions with private actors and through a series of soft laws. And vice versa, private rule-makers and privately-produced rules substantially have affected the content of public rules.
2 Payment service providers is the term introduced by the Payments Services Directive, infra note 26; it covers banks and non-banking providers of payments services. It is so used in this paper, and the term “bank(s)” is used to refer to banks with the exclusion of non-bank payment service providers. In contrast, for the sake of clarity, the terms “inter-bank” and “bank-to-customer” are used, but they refer to relationships among payment service providers, and payment service providers and customer respectively.Google Scholar
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