Maulik Sailor (00:02.126)
tool. I believe we are live now on LinkedIn as well.

Maulik Sailor (00:12.29)
the background stream is uploading.

Maulik Sailor (00:32.184)
Hello, Gautam, are... Can you please drop out, please?

Maulik Sailor (00:42.286)
Okay, I think we are live. Let me just check on the LinkedIn.

Maulik Sailor (00:56.238)
Okay, we are live on LinkedIn. Okay, let's wait for a few seconds for people to tune in and then we'll be good to kick off. Whilst we are waiting, Robert, how has been your day? What has you been up to this week?

Robert Kiszely (00:59.544)
you

Robert Kiszely (01:14.699)
yeah, I just returned from a skiing holiday on Sunday evening, so it started off busy because know all the emails are accumulating. But actually most of my time I'm spending with the SEPA Instant project in Hungary, where the Hungarian banks are joining the SEPA Instant Payment System. That's an exciting and of course quite demanding project at the same time.

Maulik Sailor (01:17.901)
Yeah

Maulik Sailor (01:31.49)
Yeah.

Maulik Sailor (01:41.09)
That's great, know, SEPA you know, we will be talking about that in a few minutes, right? But I think it's about time maybe we start our session. So those of the audience joining us live on LinkedIn or any other platform, I'm Maulik Sailor, I'm founder & CEO at Innovify and host tonight today for this podcast that we are starting. I run a company called Innovify

specialist FinTech solutions provider. And today I'm joined with Robert, Robert Kiszely, who's also a partner at Capsys, which is one of the leading implementers and then solutions provider for real-time payments in Europe, particularly in Hungary, but they are also have a good spread across the EU. And we're to talk about the future of digital finance in general.

But more specifically, we're going to cover the state of the art on the payments platform, what's happening in Europe, across the world in particular, in general and in particular in Europe. What are the tracks? What are the opportunities? You know, and we'll cover a lot of hot topics which are happening in the industry at this moment. So without further delay, Robert, would be great to have a quick intro about you, you know,

what you're having up to, you know about you, your company and your personal interests would be great.

Robert Kiszely (03:13.614)
Excellent. Thank you so much. So first of all, let me thank you for having me today. And I'm looking forward to this exciting discussion about a hot topic across Europe and across the globe. So myself, I'm Robert Kiszely I have been working for Capsys for, well, 28 years this year. I started in 1998. We have been involved in a lot of things, but the most important and exciting in the last, say, 10 years was instant payments and the implementation of instant payments in Hungary and across Europe.

And we were involved and we have been involved with the largest banks in Hungary covering around two-third of the overall volume in Hungary in terms of instant payments. And you're also, I was happy and lucky enough to lead the group that created and invented the overlay service on top of the instant payments in Hungary, which is now known as QIC, which is a payment solution on top of instant payments. And we have been very active across Europe. We have been looking at

various solutions and collaborations across Europe. And instant payment has been a hot topic since we started in 2016. There were lots of implementations going on in Europe and there are lots of solutions on top of instant payments. And that is going to be an exciting part of the discussion that we're going to have.

Maulik Sailor (04:35.65)
Yeah, that's good to know. That's a long time, to be honest. That's longer than my professional career. And I believe you would have gone across the whole EU integration, the rollout of euro and the common currency across the block. And I think you would probably would have seen all this happening firsthand in your role as a payment expert at Capsys.

So why don't we start with that? Why don't we cover what is the current status of payment systems in Europe? SEPA is obvious one, right? But beyond SEPA, what do you think? Who are the key players? What are the key systems? Just give an overview of the landscape.

Robert Kiszely (05:22.648)
Yeah, I think that the first thing that we have to say is that cards is dominating the market. It is still dominating. And I assume that it's going to still dominate for years. It's going to be there. It's going to exist. So the most important players are the card networks and all the payment service providers around cards. But at the same time, there has been a large push for SEPA and SEPA Instant. And in more general, of course,

around two-thirds or more than two-thirds now with Bulgaria are using euro in the EU, but there are still around one-third and the countries outside of the EU in Europe which are not on euro. So this also gives an interesting flavor to payments because we have multiple currencies, we multiple countries and even within the eurozone there are several solutions. Europe has a unique approach because

it is a free market. So it allows, it doesn't force a central system, it doesn't force a central regulation. This is why instant payment, when instant payment was implemented, I think around eight, nine years ago, in the euro area, it was originally intended to be a free market. was originally intended to be several small systems across Europe. And then it was recognized, and let me bring the parallel, in Hungary,

The implementation was and it has been in Hungary and for instance, so we have our own currency. So in this term, we are quite like an island, right? We have our own solution. We have our own payment system, but it is based on the European regulation. It is a mirroring of the European regulation. And Hungary was the first one in the EU to make it mandatory for the banks to join. That was in 2020 when we started, when we went live.

And the EU then implemented IPR, Instant Payment Regulation, which made it mandatory for the banks to join an instant payment central infrastructure. Because what they recognize is that the instant payments infrastructure could be the next big thing. It could serve as an infrastructure for any payment solution on top of it. And this is actually true. This is what we can see in Hungary. That if you make it mandatory, if you make all the banks join, then it's going to be a service for everyone. It's not going to be fragmented and part of...

Robert Kiszely (07:46.266)
And they also made it interoperable across Europe, currency, the eurozone. the Europe systems are connected to each other. My personal view is that this is a good approach. We should have multiple systems. We should not have one central system across the region. It gives us more resilience that we have multiple systems and it gives us more flexibility in terms of sovereignty of each country.

they can implement whatever they want in their own system. But it should be interpretable at the same time. And this is where the EU and the European level regulation and standardization comes in. So what I believe and what I see is that instant payment is the big thing coming up. Most of the countries implemented in Europe have implemented instant payments. There's a project going on in the Balkans where the Western Balkan

countries are implementing their own instant payment systems with having in mind that if they once they join the EU, then it should be interoperable with the European systems. So this is something that is that Europe has been working on for a decade now, and it's getting more and more there. There are some systems on top of that. I will tell you about that. But at the same time, let me mention what else is there. Well, you always hear about stable coins. I believe the stable coins are

are not mature to be widely accepted or widely used across Europe. And CBDC, Central Bank Digital Currency. I think that CBDC is like the digital euro, is an interesting idea, but it's not much more than an idea. There are no real implementations. It would take a lot of time. It will take a lot of time to get them implemented. As opposed to instant payments, where we have a lot of systems.

which are on top of instant payments. Like we have Quick in Hungary, which is QR code NFC and deepening based. We have BIZUM in Spain. We have Blik in Poland. We have EPI, which is from Germany and France. So we have multiple solutions across Europe, three in Switzerland, which are on top of instant payments, which are already maturing and getting there to become a real payment solution.

Maulik Sailor (10:09.134)
Yeah, that's a great overview. you know, Europe as a whole, you know, is a mix of a lot of countries with their own history, you cultural background, but also the ways of doing things, you know, their systems, their platforms, you know, their cultures and so on. Right. And, you know, I just want to take actually a little bit step back, you know, in the history a little bit. Do you think there's still a role for batch processing?

in this world or in Europe in particular.

Robert Kiszely (10:43.702)
You might be surprised by my answer. I do think that there is still a role for batch processing from practical experience. Let me give you an example. Well, of course, the role, I believe that there is a place for several different payments schemes or solutions depending on what they are used for. I give you an example. In Hungary, when the instrument payment was implemented, it was not just made mandatory to join, but it was also made mandatory to divert.

to direct transactions. So under a certain limit, every electronic re-initiated payment must be settled instantly. And then there comes the problem of paying pensions. When you pay pensioners, you pay hundreds of thousands of people at the same time. If you try to drive it into separate transactions, then the calculation will be tough because the pensioners talk to each other. And if one gets their pension,

at 7 a.m. then the other one wants to get it at not more than five minutes later. And you can do the math. It's more efficient to do that in a batch. But there are only a small number of cases. And of course, with the technology advancing, you can say that this is something that can be eliminated. So there is still room for batch payments for very large volumes such like this, but everything is being directed to the instant.

Also, there are several risks that instant payments come that bring in. Like in a region like Europe where we have multiple currencies, the cross currency rates are also a risk for the banks and for the individuals. So if I make settlements 24-7, because instant payments means 24-7, including weekends and nights, where the banks are traditionally not maintaining a treasury and they are not following the exchange rates,

then there might be a risk generated at that point. So this is also something that drives them to not allow large volumes or large value payments 24-7 over the weekend, over the nights, and delay transactions. And one more thing, one more interesting thing, what we recognize is that the merchants, a lot of the merchants don't expect the payment to be in their account immediately. They don't necessarily want to see individual transactions.

Robert Kiszely (13:08.012)
I like to bring the example that I have a relative who is a taxi driver. He tells me that, well, he wants the amount to be in the account immediately because once he made the journey, he has to go to the petrol station and he has to pay for the petrol. So he wants to have the income at the same time. For him, it's ideal and it's a low number of transactions. But a larger retailer doesn't expect the payment to be in their account every second because their treasury is not going to invest it every second.

So for them, the settlement can be done in batches and they are more preferable to be done in batches. But this is why I say that I believe that batches do have a place for large volumes or aggregated volumes, but otherwise the technology is advancing and the payments are, well, instant.

Maulik Sailor (14:00.674)
Yeah, I believe, know, whether like you the great example, by the way, of different use cases, right. I mean, where the batch payments will be very useful versus instant payment. And I believe that overall it will come down to cost versus convenience overall. Right. That, OK, how quickly do you want your payment available to you? And there might be some cost involved in that versus like, look, if you can batch the payments in one go.

than what you might have at a lower transaction processing fees that you may end up paying overall as part of all the players in the ecosystem. But that was a great overview, by the way, also talking about batch payments. But let's move on to the topic today, which is more about instant payment or real-time payments. Now, you've been involved in implementing a large-scale rollout in Hungary. Can you tell us more about that?

Robert Kiszely (15:01.752)
Well, so the Hungarian implementation, as I mentioned, it started in 2016-17 when the central bank decided that it should be that we should have a Hungarian instant payment system. At that time, there were a couple of, so a few dozen systems. I think the most notable one being the UK with faster payments since 2008. But there were several more across Europe and across the globe. And that implementation, as I mentioned, was

made mandatory. So it was based on the regulation. The central bank decided that we should have such a system. There was already a separate instant regulation which regulated how we should like, how it should look like, what should be the services, what should be the performance, etc. But the central bank also decided to make it mandatory for all the banks, which was 30, 30 at the time, who had to join that central system. And at that time,

The project was designed to be two years. So we were supposed to go live in 2019, but I think no project goes live on the planned date. there was a delay to, well, the functionality was there. We just had to make it more stable. So there was a lot of testing. was like eight or nine months of testing, load testing and resilience testing with all the banks. And if you have 30 actors,

and the central infrastructure at the same time working on the same project, then it's a big challenge. And on the 2nd of March in 2020, we went live. From the 1st of March to the 2nd of March, overnight, we went live. And we were even surprised how stable it was because all the tests that we did were exaggerated. So we had some problems during the tests, which we didn't encounter during the go live. And on the first day, because of the regulation, on the first day, we already had hundreds of

thousands of transactions, because the regulations said that under a certain amount, every transaction has to be settled instantly. And once we went live, and it was in March 2020, and at the same time, just a couple of days later, we went home when we stayed home because of COVID. COVID hit Hungary, I think on the 12th of March. And this is when we switched from in-person project to remote project.

Robert Kiszely (17:26.176)
And at that time, we started an R &D project, a research and development project, VS Capsys, which was aiming at looking at the possibilities of instant payments. What we had seen, and I like to use the saying that if you have a hammer in your hand, you think everything is a nail. So what we had seen before is that whoever had something like, if you have a POS terminal, you want to make instant payments on the POS terminal, but you want to make it like a card payment.

All the existing solutions were focusing on something that they already had and they wanted to leverage what they had. But what we did is that we looked at the different situations. We looked at all the possible payment situations and the possible flows and technologies. I'm a techie, so I'm absolutely into the technology behind it. And we looked at how it could be done, which is native to Instant Payments. without, well, leveraging.

the knowledge from cards, but not necessarily forcing whatever cards do. There lots of things that are very good and very elaborating cards. They had like 50, 60 years to develop. So we can use a lot of those. And of course you could also use the POS terminals and all the stuff which is already there, the merchants or the other payers. But it's very complicated and it's come from the era where there was no internet. So we wanted to leverage internet and smartphones.

And this is how we came up with the idea that we should use QR codes, NFC, then deep links using URLs, passing data, making it secure, et cetera. And that R &D project completed in 2022. This is when the regulator decided that, well, this should be mandatory for all the banks in Hungary again. And it was actually very successful because then our idea was turned into what is called QVIK which is a brand.

which the central bank, Hungarian Central Bank, regulated. And they made it mandatory for all the banks to implement the payer side. So we're using the bank's mobile applications as a payment device. We don't need any cards. We don't need anything with like a kernel or anything like that. I have a lot of discussions across Europe. We are the only one who are not using any card technology, but we're still using NFC. NFC is not the same as the card technology. And that is very successful. And it also launched

Robert Kiszely (19:49.806)
It's a lot of innovation in Hungary. I'll give you one example. When we did the implementation, which went live in 2024, we didn't want to do P2P, person-to-person payments. Because first, it's not that exciting. It's not that complicated. And second, it's not really a business case because somebody has to pay for the payment. if it's P2P, then people got used to having it for free. So we didn't want to implement P2P.

Maulik Sailor (20:13.685)
Yeah.

Robert Kiszely (20:17.718)
So we were focusing on C2B, consumer to business. And last year, at the end of last year, one of the largest banks, the largest bank in Hungary, OTP, they announced that they implemented P2P on top of QVIK because they could, because it allowed the innovation and because they wanted to have their own service. And this is something that they market now. So this is a good example of how a good payment solution, an open ecosystem facilitates innovation.

And even with large banks like OTP.

Maulik Sailor (20:49.634)
Yeah, that's great. You know what, once you were talking about, you know, this system in Hungary, being able to pay without the card and all, it got me thinking about the instant payment systems in India. You know, I'm from India originally, and I do often travel there. And I remember back then was really difficult to do transaction like, you know, about 15, 20 years ago, hardly anybody had any credit cards, you know.

I remember when I had to pay for GMAT exams, right? And they only take for you to book your test, you could only pay using credit card. And no one around me had credit cards. So we had to find somebody with a credit card who is willing to make a payment, online payment for us so that we can, like me and my friends, we can appear for the test, right? So just think about that about 20 years back.

to right now being able to make instant payment anywhere in India just by simple QR code scanning. even the street side vendors, which are mostly unregulated economy, they probably may not even have like a full bank account or any merchant accounts or systems, right? And they're still able to accept the payment using QR code. So think that the whole payment, instant payment ecosystem in India, I think

is mind-blowing in a way, considering that 20 years back, the state it was versus where it is right now. So in India, have UPI. I think in Brazil, they have got something similar called PIX if I'm not wrong. Do you think Europe can get to that state? Because I'm currently in London, in UK. It's still very good, the whole payment system overall here, but I still think that there's still...

It's not at the same level in my view. So what do you think?

Robert Kiszely (22:50.862)
Well, I'm both optimistic and pessimistic at the same time. I believe that yes, in short, I believe that yes, Europe can get there. Europe could get there. Europe has everything to be able to create such a solution. What Europe lacks is a central regulation and the will.

Maulik Sailor (22:57.688)
Yeah

Robert Kiszely (23:16.736)
of central regulation. This is what I have seen. I have also been involved and my colleagues have been involved in regulatory activities like EPC, European Payment Council. European Payment Council is the regulator, one part of the regulator. Well, the European regulation is very complex, it's very complicated. I think intentionally. But EPC is creating, for example, the regulation for the technologies like the SEPA-INST message formats and the like.

And I had the luck of meeting a lot of experts across Europe and EPC is involving the experts for such regulations. But what happens is that the regulation is not centrally driven. It's somehow a mixture. It's like Europe. We have 17 languages. We have a lot of solutions and everybody's looking at... Everybody wants...

the regulation to reflect their solution. And that will reflect all of the solutions. And this is what I have seen across Europe. So there are lots of discussions within EPC and within other organizations or regulators, how this could be unified and how we could unite our forces. So the downside is the upside. We have a lot of sovereign countries. We have a lot of solutions, which is very good.

from one perspective, it's a good freedom of market, right? So there's a good competition. There are lots of solutions, there are lots of ideas. But once one country has implemented theirs, then they will not necessarily want to take over another one. And then the best approach is trying to make it interoperable. So what happens right now in Europe is that we have solutions on different level of maturity.

And I agree, UPI was a central push, right? It was a regulatory idea for a huge country, a huge region. In Europe, these are smaller countries. So each market is individually, well, large enough for a solution to live, but not large enough to compete with UPI and PIX in terms of volumes. So I believe that what happens, what is most realistic to happen

Robert Kiszely (25:41.814)
is that these solutions are going to stay and they are going to be interoperable. Or there is going to be something like an overlay on top of them, which makes it like a, which turns them into a cross border solution. So this is an interesting, of course, it takes much more time for Europe to get there because it allows these small things to grow and on their own. There was an idea a couple of years ago called EPI, which is still there.

European payment initiative, which was originally the idea was that multiple countries should implement banks from multiple countries should have a shared solution which they implement. And that has been reduced to two countries, basically, or three, which is Germany, France and Belgium, if I'm not mistaken. And EPI is getting there. So the intention behind EPI is to be the major solution for Europe.

But because there are other solutions, it is not really gaining the momentum to dominate cross-0.

Maulik Sailor (26:49.71)
So funny enough, you say that like this morning I was reading like a news, one of the news here in the UK today is like, know, EU and UK again talking about access to the free market. And, you know, there's always a lot of politics involved within that. one of the, you know, Europe's or EU's core pillar is a freedom, there are four freedom movement like, you pillars, but one of them is freedom of capital, which is what the EU likes to advocate, right?

with a common currency like Euro, European Central Bank and other things, right? Do you think ECB has a role to play in this one? Maybe ECB can launch a digital Euro, for example, create a supporting system or payment systems behind that and mandate all the central banks in Europe to adopt to that. And once the central banks of respective countries do that, then...

they can also mandate the rest of the banks to follow suit, You know, could be a thought, right? Or do you think that DC just simply doesn't have enough weight to what they want to do?

Robert Kiszely (28:03.182)
ECB, as I understand, ECB has actually a dual role because ECB is the one that is running one of the central infrastructures for instant payments called TIPS, the Target Instant Payment System, which is practically the central system for all the individual instant payment systems. So ECB does provide the service across Europe in the eurozone and TIPS has already been extended to other currencies. I think one of the major

challenges of course cross currency, let's just focus on the Eurozone, which is already a huge part. So yeah, ECB, I'm pretty certain that ECB can push for, has the technology and has the service to provide a payments scheme. However, currently the idea is that ECB provides

the infrastructure and not the overlay service, not the service on the business level. So ECBs, so to say, customers are the banks. So it can only see until the banks, it can only serve until the banks. And then all the services on top of it should be provided by the banks or their customers. And that is, course, I believe that this was a different approach in Hungary. The central bank of Hungary decided that they want to regulate beyond their scope of the banks. So yes, ECB could step

step up and say that I don't just want to run tips, I want to run a scheme on top of it. At the same time, ECB as a dual role, as a second role, ECB is running a project of Digital Euro. So ECB should be or could be or would be the issuer of the Digital Euro, which is a completely different technology. I assume that it's practically a different department or different part of ECB.

sometimes even competing with the instant payments. This is also a bit of a confusion. Banks are implementing and the companies are implementing instant payments and digital euro has been communicated over the last couple of years that it's going to come and there's going to be regulation, whether it's going to be blockchain based or a central system. It's still, I don't know if it has already been decided, but now with the recent changes in geopolitics,

Robert Kiszely (30:24.27)
There is an idea that the digital euro should be the unique payment system or unified payment system for Europe. I believe that the digital euro, as opposed to instant payments, it doesn't have the background. It doesn't have the technology. It doesn't have the widespread usage. So I think it would take, even if it would be regulated or it will be regulated, it will take a decade to be implemented across Europe and all the possible payment situations.

But of course it makes sense to start from scratch and say, well, now we are in 2026, let's forget about everything that we did in the last 50 years or 60 years and let's do something new that we can control. At the same time, there are the large networks which are present in all payment solutions. And even the large networks, large card networks are penetrating the instant payment market. And I assume that they will then penetrate

the digital euro market as well, because they have the technology, they have the means, they have the funding to implement a lot of parts of those and they can leverage their existing infrastructure as well.

Maulik Sailor (31:36.511)
Yeah, just touching a few things on that, what you said, right? So within the European landscape, the whole payment infrastructure of payment technology, right? You know, course, you have cards are one of the most widely-pressed, like the most common payment mechanism, right? Which is largely dominated by Visa or MasterCard, right? Or MX, like, you know, three of the key ones.

When you talk of wallets, virtual cards or wallets, again, you have PayPal as one of the leading ones. Nowadays, you also have this buy now, pay later wallets like Klarna Klarna is a European one, Zilch in the UK, which is growing really well and happens to be one of our historic clients. But the question there is like, playing a little bit devil's advocate, right? Do you think that a lot of key...

components in this ecosystem are actually controlled by non-European actors and they might be lobbying against having a euro or EU dominated payment system or infrastructure behind that. What do you think?

Robert Kiszely (32:47.886)
Well, I think that this is a fact. It's a fact that the card systems, which are the backbone of payments, and the large part of the body of the payments across Europe, are controlled by foreign companies, so non-European companies. that is, well, the level of risks is obviously a political question. But historically, was a European payment.

the card payment scheme solution. called Eurocard. It was called Eurocard and that was sold to Mastercard. and the same applies to as far as I understand in the UK where Walkalink, which is running the central infrastructure for instant payments and other payments was sold to Mastercard. So that's, well, how to say, that's a quite normal approach that if you're into...

a market, then you want to extend your markets. the Mastercard Kaland and Visa, are obviously they are acquiring whatever they can and whatever they are finding interesting. So yes, that's deemed to be a risk. That's deemed to be a problem that a large part of the infrastructure is controlled by foreign countries. This is what is the basis of the discussion around digital currencies.

Maulik Sailor (34:12.302)
But just talking about that, if you look at India, going back to India, they launched their own RUPAY network. And they started issuing credit and debit cards, which are not Visa or MasterCard, but they're actually RUPAY cards, completely local scheme, local networks, local settlement, like homegrown, the whole infrastructure is homegrown.

Similarly, China trying something similar or they already been very successful at that, like launching Alipay payment or payments scheme. And like I can see here in the UK, for example, a lot of places which attracts a lot of tourists, particularly Chinese tourists, they will accept payment in Alipay.

So, know, previously you would say, okay, we accept Visa or MasterCard, right? Or, you know, some places still don't accept AMEX you know, for example, but now some places they, yeah, you know what, we accept Alipay, right? So do you think why Europe as a whole not able to come up with its own, you know, scheme and a card business within Europe?

Robert Kiszely (35:30.766)
That's actually a quite hard question because I don't know the exact answer to that. I think that one of the reasons is EuroCard. That there was such an idea. It was already there and then it was sold. Why it was sold, for me, is completely unclear. And it was before my time, before I got anything to do with cards. So I was not involved at that time. And I believe that if you're going through such an experience, then you don't want to do it again.

Maulik Sailor (35:48.79)
Yeah.

Robert Kiszely (35:58.902)
It's like, you know, it's a bad divorce and you might just not want to give it another try and then end up doing the same. But I believe that also the reason for that is that there are several innovations across Europe. And so there are so many ideas, there are so many innovators that just doing cars again is not really fancy. It's not really something that sounds interesting.

So I believe that they, and also I think that there is also a challenge. I don't know about Rupay and the other solutions or the other schemes, but what I understand is that even if you try to implement a card scheme, then you will have to use the technology. Otherwise you would have to also replace the POS terminals and infrastructure or a large part of the infrastructure. If you want to use the technology, then you end up using EMV, which is controlled by Eurocard MasterCard and Visa. So MasterCard and Visa. So at the end,

It's not you don't you cannot really bypass their control to a certain level as I understand. So maybe that is also an idea that that is also a reason for trying something completely different and not implementing a new card scheme. So I believe that there is just no such will to implement a European card scheme because we could implement an instant payment scheme or we could implement a digital.

Euro scheme. I think that that must be the idea.

Maulik Sailor (37:27.746)
I think it's all about geopolitics, isn't it? Particularly in the last few years, suddenly with all the troubles going on and suddenly all these stable currency institutions or payment institutions or trade institutions are suddenly under unprecedented attacks from different parties. But one of the things that I've been wondering lately is that

Recently a lot of talks has been happening about replacing US dollar Or the demise of US dollar as a global reserve or a trade currency, right and Donald Trump in particular You know, don't know whether it's true or not, know But it's like always saying like, know, the whole euro project was created to kill the dollar off, right? That's what the I think he said in in one of the video. I'm not sure what I think he did

And literally, I think yesterday there was an article in FT again, where China is trying for may be, to be the global reserve or trade currency or alternative to US dollar. Do you think Euro can still be the alternative? You Euro still quite big, I would say it's probably number two or three. It's still quite big, but it's still not assumed as default as a trade or reserve currency. Right. Do you think there's a

there is a role for Euro or the digital Euro, potential digital Euro to play here.

Robert Kiszely (39:03.598)
I think that's a possibility, of course. The digital euro, well, so let me address it from a different perspective and addressing it one more time why we are not implementing a card scheme. I think we need to implement something new, otherwise we would be just creating something that competes with the existing, right? What has been happening as innovation across the globe in the last couple of decades.

If you come up with something completely different, then you can try and dominate the whole world. Otherwise, you will just compete with another card scheme if you're just creating another card scheme. And the digital euro could be the first of its kind. So in this sense, if it's successful, if Europe does it right, and it's strong and mature in Europe, then yes, it could be, in my view, it could become a very important currency across the globe.

Whether it is going to be, I think that maybe Europe is not quick enough to do that. That's a different question.

Maulik Sailor (40:14.178)
Yeah. You know what, you can notch it up a little bit, you know, or maybe, you know, this is just a thought, right? Maybe, maybe there is a possibility for global institutions like, you know, World Bank or IMF, United Nations or whatever, right? You know, some of these global, hopefully neutral institutes to create this own version of a digital currency backed by themselves.

which could act as a neutral trading mechanism for countries across the world, regardless of all the geopolitics going on. It's just a thought. I hope there might be way towards that. I don't know politically how many countries will receive that. So anyways, that's just my thought around that. Anyways, I'm just looking at the time. We've been talking

for like I think close to about like 40, 50 minutes, I don't know. I'm not sure if you received any questions or not from the audience. Let me just quickly check and then if there are any questions and why don't we take that? Just give me one moment and I'll look into the live stream.

Sorry, I just have to open another window to see that.

Right. Yeah, actually, we don't have any live questions from the audience at this moment. Anyways, I think just mindful of the time, maybe we bring the sessions to close today. But Robert, it has been absolute pleasure to be talking to you, tapping into your knowledge of this Instant Payment systems and the platforms.

Maulik Sailor (42:10.286)
across Europe and really getting some good insights out of that. So, you know, really thankful to you for that. But I think we can wrap up the session for today.

Robert Kiszely (42:24.664)
Yes, thank you. And thank you for having me. And I also enjoyed the pleasure was all mine discussing about these topics.

Maulik Sailor (42:28.974)
Yeah, cool. Thanks a lot, Robert. All right, all the folks who are live, this has been one of our first podcasts that we are starting in 2026. We would be bringing more experts and speakers within the financial and payments and generally BFSI sector to give their thoughts about different hot topics.

We are looking to do this on a monthly basis. if you are, please connect to us on our Luma page where you can keep in the know with all the upcoming events, including a meetup that we are launching very soon, or simply just sign up to one newsletter on unify.com. So that's it for today, folks, and thank you all for joining in today.

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