Payments
How far we’ve come
Payments are changing. With application programming interfaces (APIs) and apps transforming how we do transactions – a trend spurred on by the pandemic – more and more banks are embracing payments at the click of a button. Important, too, is a more tolerant customer base. But what do these transformations actually look like at a specifi c fi nancial institution? And how are digital payments boosting both users and the banks themselves? Andrea Valentino catches up with Christoph Berentzen at Commerzbank to learn more.
Y
ou can appreciate how primitive banking payments once were simply by examining that single word: banking. It comes from the Italian
banca, and once described the wooden tables, or banche, where medieval Florentine moneylenders organised their pouches and piles of coins. If you wanted a loan, you simply went up to one of the tables and collected however much you needed. And if your banca of choice had overextended,
Future Banking /
www.nsbanking.com
losing you your florins or ducats, it was supposedly broken in front of the hapless merchant – the origin of our modern word ‘bankrupt’. Clearly, banks have changed enormously since that lost Europe of spice trades and religious ferment. But the way people made payments, to their bank or anyone else, remained static long after the Medici flittered into the history books. Rudimentary credit cards were being used by the 1920s, but even
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