Encouraging of payments innovations

Like other Eurosystem central banks, Latvijas Banka provides consultations and educational support to Latvian society, financial and public sectors, and ensures and encourages environment for innovation creation and implementation, especially within the payments area. This role of the central bank is defined as catalyst, that includes the duty to follow global technology development tendencies, be open to payments market participants, and inform about major European and global trends.

The results of active catalyst role are very well establishment of SEPA and the active work by the Euro Retail Payments Board to promote coordination and development of the European payment market serve as examples of this cooperation. In 2017, Latvijas Banka oversaw the process of creating the instant payment service that is part of the EKS, the electronic clearing system of Latvijas Banka.

Latvijas Banka acknowledges that the rapid technological development, innovations, major changes in legislation and growing digitalization has changed our every-day, as well as the whole European payments habits, and will continue to do so. In the role of catalyst, Latvijas Banka follows the major trends in the areas digital currencies, artificial intelligence, DLT technology and others, and regularly publishes articles on these topics.

FINTECH glossary

To ensure even better education of society, Latvijas Banka has created an infographic "Fintech glossary", which includes the most commonly used terms that are related to start-ups, financial technologies, artificial intelligence, DLT technology and crypto assets. These terms are often used, however, not always are they understood by the majority of the audience. Use this glossary, to understand, what-is-what.