The Bank of Italy has published a keynote speech by Deputy Governor Chiara Scotti for a University of Palermo conference on contracts and competition in European banking. The address identifies clear allocation of liability, effective access to essential technology and predictable, coherent rules as conditions for a competitive European digital payments market. Increasingly complex payment chains and artificial intelligence agents acting on users’ behalf raise unresolved questions about responsibility and market access.
Liability should reflect participants’ actual ability to prevent fraud and errors, with safeguards operating before payments are executed, particularly for instant transfers. The third Payment Services Directive and the Payment Services Regulation, whose texts are consolidated but await formal adoption, would clarify responsibilities and directly involve online platforms and electronic communications service providers in fraud prevention. Platforms could face liability for failing to remove reported fraudulent content that leads to a payment provider reimbursing a customer. For autonomous artificial intelligence agents, user authorization alone does not settle liability when systems depart from instructions or are compromised. The applicability of existing payment rules to these agents, and their interaction with the European Artificial Intelligence Act, remain unresolved.
Legal access rights must also work in practice. Poorly functioning application programming interfaces and unequal data access can obstruct open banking, while control of mobile device functionality and app stores can restrict competing payment providers. The proposed digital euro regulation would require device manufacturers and communications service providers to grant access to necessary hardware and software on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms for online and offline payments. Consistency across competition, payments and digital euro rules is needed to avoid overlaps that hinder innovation and investment. The legal framework should combine stable principles with technical regulation that can adjust more rapidly to technological change.