Vasileios Madouros: Catching and keeping up - payments innovation in Ireland

Remarks by Mr Vasileios Madouros, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, at the National Payments Conference, organised by the Banking & Payments Federation Ireland (BPFI) Dublin, 13 March 2025.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Good morning everyone. Thank you to the BPFI for organising this year's National Payments Conference and for inviting me to take part. I'm delighted to be joining you again this year.

When we met this time last year, my main message was that many of the benefits of innovation in payments remained untapped from the perspective of the domestic economy. Put differently, Ireland has been lagging behind some of our peers in terms of the payments offerings available to domestic households and businesses. The Government's National Payments Strategy (NPS), published last October, has set the foundations to address that. And our collective near-term focus now needs to be on delivery, to realise the intended outcomes outlined in the NPS.

In my remarks today, though, I would also like to look further ahead. To consider not just how we catch up with the frontier of innovation of payments, but how we keep up over time. Because that frontier continues to shift rapidly, driven by technological and business model innovation.

Technological shifts and the ongoing evolution in the payments landscape

To illustrate this point, let me start with a brief look back at the evolution that we have already seen in the payments landscape.