Skopje, 30 August 2023  

The harmonization of the national with the EU legislation in the field of payment systems was the most important goal of the Strategy for Development of the Payment Systems, which resulted in adoption of the Law on Payment Services and Payment Systems. The Law began to be applied from the beginning of this year, while the National Bank adopted 26 bylaws for its enforcement. The regulation will encourage competitiveness and innovation and increasing consumer protection. “Overall, we have created a legal framework for the new generation of technologies which will encourage innovation and will make payments simpler, more secure and cheaper”, said the Manager of the Payment Systems Department at the National Bank, Igor Velickovski, in an interview for the international e-publication Central Bank Payment News”.

Velickovski said that the new legislation would transform the payment systems, primarily through encouraging competitiveness and introducing new payment service providers. If earlier only banks could provide payment services and only certain institutions could provide cross-border money transfer, this is now changing.  The Manager of the Payment Systems Department emphasized that throughout the years, especially after the pandemics, there was a rising use of payment cards in trade, as well as money transfer mobile applications.  These trends will be supported and encouraged in the future with the introduction of open banking in our country which will provide number of benefits for the payment services users.

Through transposition of the European directives in the field of payment services, in the national legal framework the consumer protection is increased as well.  Velickovski pointed out that customer are better informed on payment services, and that each payment service provider should sign a standardized framework agreement with the users and inform them regularly on the fees.  The payment account with basic functions is a higher level of consumer rights protection, which prescribes a reasonable amount of fee that can be charged for operating this account.  An additional novelty in terms of public information is the possibility to compare the fees for eleven most representative payment services from all providers in one place, the National Bank website, which will ensure greater competitiveness among payment service providers.

In the interview, the Manager of the Payment Systems Department spoke of the trends in the field of payments in terms of activities undertaken by the regulators in our country for development of the fintech sector and greater financial inclusion of the population, international cooperation, blockchain technology and introduction of digital currency issued by the central bank.  The full interview is available at the following link: https://cbpaymentsnews.com/assets/CBPN_Volume6/CBPN-2023_August_Vol6No8.pdf.