András Becsei
President of the Hungarian Banking Association between July 2019 and May 2020, during the implementation phase of the project
Rollout of the instant payment service: How the displacement of cash began If we look back on 2020 a few years from now, this period will surely be remembered for the extraordinary ordeals caused by the pandemic, but also for the major milestone in financial digitalisation. The state of emergency transformed the world as we knew it in a flash, past truths have been questioned, and previously unchallenged taboos have been shattered. The changes affected education, daily work, our relations with family and friends and last but not least our banking habits. Hungarian banks’ IT developments implemented in the past years played a central role in enabling our customers to conduct their finances with the usual efficiency during the pandemic. Perhaps the largest project that affected the entire population, fundamentally transforming the Hungarian payment infrastructure was the introduction of the instant payment service in March this year.
BANKS ON THE ROAD TO CONSTANT RENEWAL Banks are traditionally committed to modernisation. However, when it comes to innovation, many of us think of the developments of the fintech firms of the 2010s or the financial innovations of social networks (e.g. the financial services of WeChat owned by Tencent have been available in a simplified form since 2014). However, the foundations of the technologies used today had been laid down by banks over decades, starting in the 1950s. The first versions of the modern credit card used for paying at merchants appeared in 1958. Wider distribution and use was facilitated by the POS terminal emerging in 1979 which eliminated the need to call the bank to approve card acceptance. Internet banking services
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