31.7.14

Late july in 1914 and 2014: two significant moments in time

A hundred years ago, the first World War was gradually developing. The political and military turmoil affected the stock exchanges all over the world and the Dutch stock exchange closed. In the Netherlands a run occured for physical silver and the government decided to issue the so-called 'Zilverbon', which was a future claim to physical silver as it would become available. Almost overnight, the payments infrastructure was changed; an infrastructure that was mostly based on the use of cash rather than bank accounts and payment instruments.

Fast forward to today: after a long period of careful planning, we are again at the verge of changing our payment infrastructure by moving to European standards in the retail payments domain. Both political and economic drivers have caused a massive technical change, which to the consumer is mostly visible via the ultralong new bank account number IBAN that has to be used as of tomorrow.

What changed in the mean time?
In between these two historic moments we witnessed:
- the gradual development of city giros, nationwide giro and bankgiro systems, account systems and the development and issuance of domestic payment instruments (acceptgiro, standing order, direct debit, guarantueed cheque, card and app payments),
- a continued learning process with respect to counterparty risk (on the exchange or with respect to banks and countries) and the development of a lot of regulation to mitigate this,
- two world wars, followed by the further economic integration of European countries into the European Union; a body that shows Member States that are still struggling with their position with respect to military action in the Eastern parts of Europe, bordering Russia,
- an improvement in living conditions, welfare and wealth.

What really changed?
It is not easy to distinguish the underlying changes in our society. Technological change may often appear to be progress while it simply reflects and allows the human faults to be reproduced on a more advanced level.

Still, I would hope the most significant change over the last century to be that we have created a number of institutions (UN, GATT, BIS, World Bank, IMF) that allow countries to not fight their battles on the ground but in economic terms. There are of course deficiencies within these institutions, but I would hope that we will move forward in using these structures to limit the amount of military conflicts as much as possible.