ING: Building European resilience through payment sovereignty
As Head of Payment & Settlement Services at ING, Roel Huisman shares his perspective on why payment sovereignty is becoming increasingly important, the role of European payment initiatives in strengthening autonomy, and the challenges of building scale and resilience in a rapidly evolving payments landscape.
As Head of Payment & Settlement Services at ING, Roel Huisman shares his perspective on why payment sovereignty is becoming increasingly important, the role of European payment initiatives in strengthening autonomy, and the challenges of building scale and resilience in a rapidly evolving payments landscape.
How do you define payment sovereignty, and how important is this concept within your overall strategy?
In essence, payment sovereignty is about establishing full control over—and resilience of—our payment services. For ING this is a matter of critical importance. First of all given the relevance and importance of payments for our clients, who use us as their primary bank and therefore heavily depend on these payment services. Next to that, this is also important to ensure the proper functioning of our bank and of the financial markets and economy at large.
To what extent does ING prioritize local payment infrastructures over international systems? What advantages and challenges does this approach involve?
We are the primary bank for our customers, and ensuring an excellent customer experience whenever and wherever our customers make payments is of critical importance.
With regard to our payment infrastructure, we are convinced that scale is required to sustain long-term viability and competitiveness. ING is a large player in payments processing in Europe and as such we are leveraging our size.
The choice of local or international infrastructures is secondary to those objectives. Quality, control, and resilience—and thus sovereignty—are imperatives when selecting and/or building the different components of our payment infrastructure.
How does payment sovereignty contribute to protecting your customers’ data and strengthening resilience against cyber risks?
Payment sovereignty and cyber resilience are directly correlated in the sense that both are about being in control, including operational redundancy across the full chain.
On data, the priority is ensuring lawful access and availability under the jurisdictions we operate in. We need to prevent data from being rendered inaccessible due to legal conflicts, cloud provider restrictions, or third-country laws, and we need to prevent data from being accessed in unlawful ways. Having alternative processing options helps us manage those risks.
Is your bank developing or supporting national payment solutions (for example, CBDCs, local wallets, or internal interbank networks)?
Yes, we actively support European initiatives that reduce dependencies on parties outside the EU and strengthen monetary and payments sovereignty. As a European bank, ING is actively involved in efforts that build European options and resilience.
One example is WERO: ING is one of the initiators of EPI, which is developing a pan European payment solution, allowing customers and merchants to pay digitally across Europe. ING is implementing WERO (EPI) in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany alongside our existing card solutions.
To establish a true pan-European solution, EPI has joined forces with the EuroPA initiative and other schemes, aiming to achieve cross-border reach by connecting existing national mobile payment solutions and making them interoperable. The goal is to build a sovereign, pan-European retail payment network without creating a new scheme from scratch.
A second example is Qivalis, where ING is one of the founding members. Qivalis is a bank-led initiative to create a MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation)-compliant euro stablecoin. The aim is to strengthen Europe’s payment and monetary autonomy in the digital economy.
What role do regulators and local financial partners play in your payment sovereignty initiatives? Do you see this more as a matter of cooperation or competition?
It can be both: regulation can support sovereignty, but public initiatives can also overlap with private ones. On the one hand, the Digital Markets Act (2022) pushes large digital platforms to restore user choice, making alternative payment methods available in apps beyond closed in-app purchase systems.
On the other hand we are concerned about overlapping use cases, for example between the digital euro and WERO, as we have learnt that payment solutions need scale to succeed, and overlapping propositions will fragment adoption.
In your view, what are the main obstacles to payment sovereignty, and how is your bank preparing to overcome them?
Payment processing and payment schemes only work efficiently when adoption is broad. That is why standardization matters, within ING and across the European financial industry, to make solutions interoperable and easier to adopt.
For account-to-account payments, Europe is relatively strong thanks to pan-European schemes such as SEPA Credit Transfer, SEPA Instant Credit Transfer, and SEPA Direct Debit. The focus now is to optimize usage and build further scale.
For card payments, Europe still has work to do, but with WERO and EuroPA, meaningful progress is underway.
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