The organiser of the conference was traditionally Rietumu Bank.
The current eCom21 has become the third thematic conference in succession which is held in the capital of Latvia by Rietumu Bank. This year the conference was attended by about 450 guests from the Baltic Region, Central, Eastern and Western Europe, the CIS, Asia and other parts of the world. In total, over 30 countries were represented.
During the discussions and plenary meetings, the participants discussed conceptual aspects of the introduction and usage of electronic money, its prospects, issues of the interaction of this new type of currency with other payment instruments, the use of e-wallets, the evolution of payments by virtual money and the use of plastic cards as its carriers, as well as prospects of payment by means of smartphones. Other discussed issues were topical tendencies in the field of legislation, supervision and control with regard to electronic money, technological aspects and issues of reliability of virtual settlements.
The eCom21 guests emphasised the growing role of electronic money in online transactions and their big potential. A specially emphasised issue was the necessity of cooperation with public regulators regarding supervision over this rapidly evolving business.
Thus, a spokesperson of the company Transact Pro Andrey Bosko, in his speech, drew attention to the importance of the right assessment of risks regarding anti-money laundering on the part of issuers of electronic money. “The success of the issuer's operation largely depends on the issuer, on how it secures transparency of the organisation and informs about its activities. It is very important for conducting business how a company is evaluated by its partners, how well they understand the company structure and principles of operation. Without a correct assessment of risks, no long-term effective operation is possible.”
Mr Bosko also noted that regulation of e-commerce will be developing and it is important for entrepreneurs to take into account new tendencies in this field.
The tendency of strengthening regulation in the field of e-commerce and e-money was also emphasised by the Senior Lawyer of the auditing company PwC Yana Orlova in her speech. She told that in 2016 general reporting standards of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development will take effect anticipating profound information exchange between financial institutions and public structures of different countries.
In his turn, the Head of the Data Centre Business Development Department of
Lattelecom Technology Maris Sperga thinks that in the nearest five years, apart from traditional currencies, crypto-currencies will play the growing role in settlements. Therefore, the issues of supervising such transactions, data safety and securing the required legislative regulation become increasingly more pressing.
He also addressed issues of creating an infrastructure which secures safety of online transactions, “Increasingly more companies transfer from traditional trade to e-commerce. To guarantee safety of such transactions, the infrastructure must comply with the requirements of the PCI/ DSS certification. Taking into account this tendency and the growing amount of transactions, our data centre DATTUM, which has already been certified for the TIERIII safety level, will also receive the PCI/DSS certification in early 2015. The requirements for this certification have been developed by Visa and MasterCard systems and it will be the evidence that the corresponding data centre meets the latest norms of processing financial transactions.”
Speakers of the conference were leading professionals of the industry, representatives of payment systems, public regulators, biggest auditing companies, lawyers, IT specialists and other experts. Among them being spokespersons from MasterCard,Visa, Bitcoin Foundation, ECommPay, ChinaUnionPay, Yandex.Money, Money.Mail.Ru, QIWI, Payonline, DEAC, RBK Money, leading experts of central banks and public regulators, the Big Four of auditing companies, Russian association “Electronic Money” and others.
The eCom21 conference was held in Riga on 13 and 14 November. The general partner of the forum is EcommPay – the international provider of payment solutions. The strategic partner is the first licensed issuer of e-money in Latvia TransactPro Eleonora Gailisha Mass Media and Public Relations
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