Glossary

Glossary

Acceptance of cash: Defined as ensuring cash is accepted as a means of payment everywhere (facilitated by financial institutions, retailers and others).

Access to cash: Defined as public access to services to withdraw and deposit cash (facilitated by banks and other stakeholders).

Application Program Interfaces: Application programming interface is a software which allows communication between different applications or systems.

Authorised push payment fraud: Authorised push payment fraud, a type of fraud in which the payer (an individual or a business) is tricked into authorising a payment to a fraudster posing as a genuine payee.

Central bank money: This consists of banknotes and coins in circulation (cash) and the electronic accounts that credit institutions hold at the central banks (reserves). Cash has the status of legal tender unlike commercial bank money. Central bank money is credit and liquidity risk-free as the default risk of a central bank is in principle non-existent.

Digital payment: Used interchangeably with “electronic payment”, defined below.

Digital wallets: A service that enables end users to initiate transfers of value by storing secure information related to the electronic payment instruments required to initiate the transfers. It can also be used to register and hold personalised security credentials. Depending on its design, a wallet can be used, before or during a payment process, to fund a payer account linked to the wallet and offered by the wallet provider with funds or digital payment tokens. It can also provide the payee with information related to the payment instrument without being linked to such an account.

Electronic payments: An e-Payment (or ‘electronic-payment’) is one in which monetary value is transferred electronically between two parties. Any payment that is not transacted by paper based instruments is considered an e-Payment transaction.

Euro area: The area encompassing the 19 EU Member States in which the euro has been adopted as the single currency and in which a single monetary policy is conducted under the responsibility of the relevant decision-making bodies of the ECB.

FinTech: Defined as the use of technology to deliver retail banking products and services to consumers and SMEs.

Heads of a Bill: Outline of a bill that is set to be published by the Government.

IBAN discrimination: IBAN discrimination is where an employer or company, such as a utility company, refuses to accept a SEPA IBAN for euro payments. IBAN discrimination is not permitted under the SEPA Regulation.

IBAN: An international payment account number identifier, which unambiguously identifies an individual payment account in an EU Member State, the elements of which are specified by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO).

NPS team: The specific team in the Department of Finance that is working on the National Payments Strategy.

Point of sale: The address of the physical premises of the merchant at which the payment transaction is initiated, (PoS)

SEPA Inst: This is a Pan-European instant payment scheme that allows domestic and cross-border payments in euro to be made to and received from participating payment service providers (PSPs) anywhere in the Single Euro Payments Area.

SEPA: The Single Euro Payments Area initiative, covers all EU Member States, together with Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and Monaco. This came into force in 2014, created a single market for euro-denominated retail payments, allowing payment services users to make cashless, euro-denominated payments to payees located anywhere in the area that it covers under the same basic terms and conditions, using just one payment account and a single set of payment instruments.

Strong customer authentication: A method of authentication based on the use of two or more elements categorised as knowledge (something only the user knows), possession (something only the user possesses) and inherence (something the user is) that are independent, in that the breach of one does not compromise the reliability of the others, and is designed in such a way as to protect the confidentiality of the authentication data.

Request to pay: The RTP is not a payment means or a payment instrument, but a way to request a payment initiation. At a technical level an RTP can be defined as the set of operating rules and technical elements (including messages) that allow a payee (or creditor) to claim an amount of money from a payer (debtor) for a specific transaction.