LEAPFROG

Michael Salmony 0:12

Hello, my name is Michael Salmony and I'd like to welcome you to another episode of the Payments Trilogue where this time we're going to try a slightly off the wall idea together. And this is maybe not doing things the way we've always been doing it, but trying a new approach in around industrial policy. Because what we've been doing in the past is basically always being trying to catch up.

The Asians have been ahead, the Africans have been ahead on mobile, the ⁓ US has been ahead on cards, et cetera, et cetera And the idea of always trying to catch somebody else up has not had great success. In Europe, we've tried several times to do our own cloud. That didn't go entirely well to build our own. ⁓

PayPal in Germany that didn't meet with a lot of success. Some of the merchants tried to develop alternative solutions. India, although it's a massive success with its UPI, didn't actually manage to solve the sovereignty issue. So as soon as you try to just follow what others are doing and trying to do your own version, that doesn't usually work. There's plenty of evidence of that.

So the idea is that some people are thinking about is how about we don't just follow, but we lead. We do leapfrog. Just like the Asians jumped straight to the wallets, basically jumping over cards. Maybe the Africans went straight to mobile some years ago and also jumped over a few hoops. Why don't we think about where Europe is really good, what our values are, what our infrastructure has.

and maybe we could jump ahead and then others would have to follow us. Now this is a bit of an off the wall idea, a bit controversial, a bit ⁓ different to the usual thinking, but just be interested to hear what you, Ralf, who is a traditional disruptor, and if we have a lot of leadership in Europe on APIs and on fintechs, whether that might not be something that might be worth thinking about.

Ralf Ohlhausen 2:28

Yes. And I guess I couldn't agree more. just because you mentioned it reminds me of, know, in my in former life, I brought mobiles to Jamaica and Haiti, which never ever had landlines and obviously leapfrogged that ⁓ technology, which they never, you know, had the money to actually implement because it was always too expensive. And, and when mobiles came along, that was then suddenly possible.

In a similar way, I think we have had our leads in Europe on various technologies. Now, I think we've lost basically all the battles. And we've discussed it previously, remember, with Chris Pirkner, who also thought that we really were not successful so far with all those technology items. And I guess, let me repeat it once more. So I think

One of the reasons is because we are the Silicon Valley of regulation. Maybe there is space for regulation in this business, but maybe not on the technology side, but more on protecting the European ⁓ part of it. Maybe we'll come back to that. Generally speaking, I think we are now in ⁓ quite a good position, actually, because many

of the current hot topics, maybe excluding AI, but everything else of those, like the hot topics, I think are European, account to account, know, identity wallets, open finance, etc. So we've lost our lead in open banking, which was really stupid. And now let's hope that we can, whatever, recover that somehow, and we will not make the same mistake with open finance.

because that's one of my biggest worries at the moment. We have 10, 20 years of open finance in Europe and everyone thinks this is new and everyone wants to do some new regulation now. And we've got to make sure that we are not regulating it wrongly. We cannot disturb the growth and disrupt the growth of all our hundreds of open finance companies we have in Europe, currently world leading. So whatever we do, and yes, we should do FIDA, but we've to do it right and minimalistic on

how to, and fostering it. And that's really what we need. But there are other examples. I mean, here closer to our payments home, of course, with account to account, I fully agree, actually, with the idea of, you know, making European payments great again, based on account to account based on instant payments in particular, because, again, also mentioned this before, it's the best.

And most efficient way to move money from A to B is a credit transfer. And the only reason we have had cards and wallets and other overlays is because these credit transfers were not instant. And you need instant, not the money, but instant guarantee for the payment, instant certainty in commerce or in retail payments. So that's why we had all of that. But with instant payment, that reason goes away. And it is

more efficient. So we don't need all these overlays anymore. So we are here on the right track. And we just got to make sure that we're not losing it. And yes, as you know, we have different initiatives, EPI, EMPSA, open banking, there are various ways of doing it. And yes, maybe there is some core more coordination or etc. standardization to be had, but ⁓ really important that we are not regulating it down to zero.

Gijs Boudewijn 6:04

Thank

Ralf Ohlhausen 6:14

So that's just one of the examples, really.

Michael Salmony 6:17

Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And of course, I'm a big fan of FIDA as well and opening data and unlocking all the new possibilities. That's something again, where Europe is ahead. And I think a lot of people are not aware how far Europe is ahead in a lot of payment things, right? I mean, we have all the banks connected. They're all basically all instant, more or less. There's a common addressing scheme. There's so many things which for us are a given.

Gijs Boudewijn 6:33

Mm-hmm.

Michael Salmony 6:45

But in the US, for example, the payments infrastructure is miles behind that, right? And so we could leverage that. And Gijs, it seems to me the Dutch were already very smart when they introduced iDEAL. That was a leapfrog. I'll quickly just expand on that. Because all the other countries who didn't do iDEAL,

Gijs Boudewijn 6:58

Yes, yes they were. ⁓

Michael Salmony 7:06

then became subjects of Visa and MasterCard and PayPal, which you've managed to keep out of your country, and you have your national sovereign solution because you solved the problem before the others could grab hold. So that for me is already a leapfrog that you did in the Netherlands.

Gijs Boudewijn 7:22

It was a small frog indeed in the e-commerce space, not at the point of ⁓ the physical point of sale, because there we de-leapfrog because we gave up our own physical POS system and sold it to, basically to MasterCard. But indeed, if we want to leapfrog in payments technology and if you will for digital sovereignty, we indeed need to go beyond catching up and we really have to reshape the game.

And I've been a little bit naughty because what would that take? While you two guys were talking, I was asking ChatGPT on how that would look like. it pretty much, want to you the first point is build a truly European digital payments infrastructure based on instant payments, link it with the EUID wallet, digital identity integration, interoperable APIs. Well, one API for the whole of Europe.

create a strategic public private partner innovation platform with a huge sandbox do programable money tokenization. Well, the lead with a digital Europe. Not sure that that would be a good idea. I mean, go all in and secure, set the global standard. I mean, all the ingredients are there. So for me, the leapfrogging is not so much a real technology issue, but how do you organize it in such a way?

that the innovative pieces are not picked up by outside forces because that is what we have seen happening over the past decade. All these FinTech innovators that seem to become, and even those that have maybe died down most of the innovation capacity and stuff that was developed was, when it was promising, was bought up by the non-European players, which have such deep pockets. And I told somebody...

I'm nothing against Visa or MasterCard, they are such big, and Google or Apple for that matter, big platforms, but they are so big, much bigger than the combined European banking industry. So let's say the buying power, the execution power, hmm, we see this happening, okay, we'll buy this company for two billion, okay, we can write it off, whatever, if it doesn't become successful. There is no such mechanism, central mechanism in Europe.

on the supply side of the payment industry. Guys with 5,000 banks and 2,000 fintechs, collectively we decide this is the technology we're gonna use to leapfrog. I mean, it's not the technology, it's how to organize it and finance it, I would say.

Michael Salmony 10:07

Exactly,

exactly. I mean, this again brings us back to the industrial policy topic, right? At the moment we have sort of, you know, there's a steer in agriculture and in energy and in quantum and in all these other things where the state is sort of driving things. Not sure whether we want that in payments, right? We don't want more steer, but sort of a coordination across Europe where we say, okay, what is a good thing where...

Gijs Boudewijn 10:11

Yeah, absolutely.

Michael Salmony 10:31

Europe is really good, which forces our value, which will increase our autonomy, which will bring us forward. You know, we're super good on APIs. We were the first to come out with stable coin regulation. We are super good at instant and connected. have, we of course are very good at regulation. So how about sort of compliance, know, automated compliance.

How about fraud, right? I mean, we're following what others are doing in fraud with this ridiculous VOP thing, right? Which is addressing the fraud of three years ago. How about doing a fraud alliance across Europe for modern fraud, right? And showing the world how to defend against fraud. There are plenty of ideas out there, and I totally agree with you. This isn't a technology question. We can do all this, but how do we organize it? How do we fund it and how do we get the players together? So either of you have any thoughts on that?

Ralf Ohlhausen 11:22

Well, it's exactly what we need are the authorities to orchestrate, not to regulate. So they got to help and support and ask, what can we best do this and consult and then will we maybe we cannot all agree between banks and fintechs, but we can, I'm sure we can agree 50 % or something there. So I think it is about

What we need is orchestrator and I guess, mean, there are other possibilities like the EPC, I guess, is a good orchestrator or the EPSG now as well. So we are, and of course we are working there on that. it is the main thing really is to make sure that in terms of legislation or regulation, we focus on how to protect the European interest in that and not how to tell the industry how to do things.

So, but.

Gijs Boudewijn 12:17

Yeah, but Ralf,

I recall that we were talking about autonomy, then the mantra was, no, it's about strategic autonomy. And then quickly the word open was added to it. It's about open strategic autonomy because we do not want to close off the European market. So we both want to sort of have the cake and eat it, create a European environment with a regulatory framework.

On the other hand, we are very much into the open economy, free market forces, etc. etc. Which means anyone from the outside that comes in and gets the proper license somewhere in the EU will reap the benefits of this nice internal market, And that's where it somehow, how would this, ⁓ more a question to Michael, how would that industrial policy there fit in? Because there's always a price to pay. We can't have the cake and eat it.

Michael Salmony 13:14

Yeah.

Ralf Ohlhausen 13:14

hang

on before before Michael, let me let me address this. Because I've brought this up before, vis-a-vis the Commission and also the ECB at length about the question on sovereignty and, and also doing it in a way which is not like protectionism that we see elsewhere. But sovereignty on

with a positive, with a good spirit, with a European way of doing it. And we can have that because we are controlling the legal framework with all our regulations, PSD2, 3, etc. AMLR, etc. So we are controlling the access because you need a license, you can't, and you need a ⁓ European entity in order to get a license. So you can't just do it from the US or from somewhere from China. So you have to have some some presence.

Gijs Boudewijn 13:43

Mm-hmm.

Ralf Ohlhausen 14:10

in Europe. we are controlling the standards. So we have eIDAS and whatever you name it, we have all these also European standards that we control and that others would then have to follow. We are controlling the rails, because we have the clearing and settlement infrastructure, TIPS, all the ECB infrastructure, all the other CSMs, etc. We are controlling the rules, even the EPC, all the rulebooks, all the schemes and

Well, we could also control a European identity, you know, one of my pet projects getting something like ⁓ powered by SEPA, TIPS inside something ⁓ trust mark there.

Gijs Boudewijn 14:46

But Ralf, how do you control the outflow? Ralf,

sorry to interrupt, but how do you then, because that is, called in the early days SEPA, Sending Euro Payments to America, instead of the Single Euro Payments area. So I'm totally with you. We control the institutional environment, regulation, and blah, blah. But then the monies, the profits, the proceeds, the revenues still flow elsewhere. How do you control that then?

Ralf Ohlhausen 15:13

Yeah, no, but that's what I mean. That's what I meant when I said that the authorities got to protect the European interest. So that can be a matter of law or regulation on making sure that the intellectual property and the proceeds, the revenues, at least the profits, maybe not the losses stay in Europe. that is where I would hope that we could sort of refocus our ⁓

legislation and regulation.

Michael Salmony 15:43

Sounds like you want tariffs

for a thing. You want some tariffs. but seriously, I think that one term I found rather useful in this debate was the convener, right? It's very hard for sort of one part of the industry to say, let's all come together, for example, to develop a new anti-fraud alliance or to do a new B2B scheme or to do a transmission of invoices between corporates, right?

Gijs Boudewijn 15:46

Yeah. ⁓

Michael Salmony 16:12

because you can't just let the banks call everybody because then the merchants will say, why aren't we organizing that? So that's why I think this state has a role as a convener, just to bring people together, bang heads together and say, look, this is stupid. We're developing five different pan-European schemes. Can't we sort of sit in a room together and coordinate ourselves? Or can't we develop something new, some new leapfrog topic, right?

So I like this idea of a convener that doesn't mean regulation, that doesn't mean writing the rules, the industry writes the rules, but bringing people together in the convener role, which I don't think the state is doing very much in our space.

Gijs Boudewijn 16:49

Who's then going to determine what the convener wants to convene? I mean, they may convene stuff we don't like to be convened to or whatever the proper English term would be. So what process would lead to prioritizing those leapfrog topics that are worth convening? We're still a democracy. Should that be a political involvement there of the member states or the European Parliament?

saying to the Commission, guys, these are the topics we want you to convene stuff that is leapfrog-able.

Michael Salmony 17:25

Yeah,

that's a fair question, absolutely. And I mean, I have some ideas, I'm sure you have some ideas, Ralf has some ideas, and some people could sit in the back room and say, look, this is a list of things we could do. And I mentioned some, right, several times before.

You know, let's build a common way of combating frauds, for example. Let's do a B2B ⁓ initiative. Let's do how do we leverage the instant ⁓ connectivity? ⁓ We do more automated compliance without, you know, there are enough ideas out there and maybe some of them are stupid. I'm sure I've, I don't, the list I've just named isn't complete, but a sort of a few smart heads could sort of sit together in a back room somewhere and say,

Let's have a think about that.

Gijs Boudewijn 18:12

And how, in

that perspective, Michael, how would you gauge the, as an analogy, the large scale pilots that not DG FISMA, but DG CONNECT have been organizing for, let's say, possible use cases, possible leapfrog-able stuff ⁓ building upon the European identity wallet. It sort of feels like some leapfrogging stuff.

Michael Salmony 18:34

Yeah,

mean, I'm a huge fan of the identity initiative in Europe. I think that's really smart. It's attribute based and it goes cross industries. It's not just government, but it's government and bank and health and education. are lots of things to like about the EU ID wallet.

Gijs Boudewijn 18:52

Travel or whatever.

Michael Salmony 18:58

I'm not such a fan of the large scale pilots, if you will permit, because, you know, in classic European style, it has to have somebody from Greece and somebody from academia and somebody from the Nordics and somebody from there. You end up having about 30 parties in there. And that, course, means you produce more paper than actual real, real insights. But the idea, for example, identity as a thing that is being created in Europe, I'm not aware of anything like that elsewhere.

Gijs Boudewijn 19:10

And then this is, yeah.

Michael Salmony 19:27

and making that a global thing, why not? I I love that idea.

Ralf Ohlhausen 19:33

Well, I think the pilots are, yes, I mean, they they have their problems with the sort of variety ⁓ involved. But I think overall, it is a very good approach. So I think it is helpful. It takes us forward. Maybe with less parties inside, would have been faster, but it's also good to have different ones so that there are you have different ways of doing it. And you can basically see whichever is better. We're

We're not losing time. We're having some support and investment there from the authorities there in driving us forward. So I think that is one of the better models to be improved. But I think that goes the right way. another one is these expert groups where I'm in two of them on the financial data spaces and the other one, Gijs we are together in with the payment market systems.

And we have, and we're just running a project there, you know, with the trying to have identifying and recommending ways of ⁓ removing obstacles for using instant payments at POS. that is also good, but you know, the output or the way this should be organized or worked is not that it then is just

Michael Salmony 20:33

together and you think that's what you're doing, right?

Ralf Ohlhausen 21:02

⁓ informing the Commission and then leading to maybe better regulation, but probably more regulation. So yes, if we have more regulation, hopefully it'll be better. But even better would be not having this with the aim of regulation, but having this with the aim of some pilot or some orchestration, not ⁓ more regulation.

Michael Salmony 21:27

I mean, this is something we've been saying in this this trilogue forever, right? Maybe we just sit together across industry, fintechs and banks and others and develop solutions. we maybe the regulator can give us a push and a nudge and some some things, but we shouldn't ask for the regulator to always tell us what to do. Right. So this is another instance.

Gijs Boudewijn 21:46

Yeah,

and then one tricky thing always comes in, Michael, there has to be something in it for all parties. There has to be a sustainable business model that is rewarding for all involved, all concerned, because there's no such thing as a free lunch. And the upfront uncertainty of the eventual business model of anything you do is not a good incentive for good things to happen if it's not upfront.

There's something in it for Ralf. There's something in it for the merchant, something for the consumer and something for, let's say, the bank in a balanced way, et cetera. ⁓ That balancing act of the business model is also a crucial part of any leapfrogging unless you just mandate it and regulate it. Then it becomes a compliance thing. But if you want to leave it up to market participants, there has to be something in it, an incentive for all to create great solutions. We've seen that with PSD2.

where banks didn't get anything for it and then built perhaps not so good APIs. I have many times I've ⁓ echoed Ralf who said, I'd rather have ⁓ good but not so free APIs than free but not so good APIs as a TPP, right? ⁓

Michael Salmony 23:03

But isn't

Ralf Ohlhausen 23:03

Yes,

Michael Salmony 23:03

that-

Ralf Ohlhausen 23:03

and even there, we have, we are leading the world. We have been and it was in our SPAA group that I guess we were the first in the world to create an a business model for account to account, open banking account to open banking based account to account payments. So

And now it's being I don't know if you've seen it. So the UK is currently more or less replicating it a year later. And I'm sure other countries will also go in a similar direction. And I know that it wasn't easy to agree. And yes, it took a year or one and a half, can't remember. And etc, etc. But we are, I think even on the business model side, we are ahead.

And what's missing is bringing it to life.

Michael Salmony 24:02

But if we rewind history just a moment, instead of the regulator having come in in 2000, whatever it was, to do PSD2 and force the banks to do these free APIs and also cause some problems for the fintechs who then felt they were actually taken back several years, they could have said, let's all sit together in a room, the banks and the fintechs, work out a model which works for all of us, which you just said, Gijs, right? Which makes it interesting for the banks and doesn't throw the fintechs back.

And we could have emerged with something that we're doing right now, like the SPAA or whatever, a workable model. This might have worked faster and much better than the way we actually did it through top-down regulation.

Gijs Boudewijn 24:37

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Ralf Ohlhausen 24:43

Yeah.

And we're just about to have another opportunity for that in open finance as we go towards that. And the FIDA regulation, as you know, has its views, which I think, again, are not of the business to the authority. I would not want ⁓ the regulation to prescribe

commercial model, do you got to pay for this and but you can't do it this way or that way has to be this way has to be can't be more than that, whatever. this is not for me, a place for regulation. The it's the the market and the market participants that I think can battle out what is reasonable, what should be paid for one and just to give you an example, because what you are not

to paid for is the data itself. So the customer, it's the customer's data. So they have an access, right to their access to their data and that's it. And if they want the TPP helping them with them, then that's it. They should not pay again for all the TPP for getting that data. So the business model for open finance is not about just charging everything on an API. It has to be something which the customer doesn't own already.

So it can only be the additional bits and pieces like what we've done in SPAA, the value added services beyond the regulatory part, beyond the what belongs to the customer already because he has a user interface and everything he sees in there is part of it. ⁓ but I'm, well, I maybe I'm naive, but I think we could agree.

on what should be charged, what should not be charged. At least we've managed it to do in SPAA and I think we could do it again. But if we leave that to regulation, the outcome I think will be horrific.

Michael Salmony 26:35

And for everybody, every side sees that, right? The banks said, we're not happy and the fintechs were not happy, right? ⁓

Ralf Ohlhausen 26:40

Yeah, you will

make both sides equally unhappy again. And that's really not what we want to do again.

Michael Salmony 26:45

Thank

Gijs Boudewijn 26:47

equally happy

as well as not equally unhappy, otherwise we shouldn't do it.

Ralf Ohlhausen 26:51

Yeah, exactly.

Michael Salmony 26:52

is happening? Does the regulator not have confidence the industry would get its act together and agree on something that it feels it needs to do this top-down? What's your analysis on this?

Gijs Boudewijn 27:03

But why, there's a question before, why on earth does the regulator, i.e. the Commission, come up with a policy and then ⁓ the proposals for legislation? Because it's not the parliament, well technically it could be, but it's not the council, it's not the parliament, it's the Commission from which typically all these proposals come out of. And these civil servants, as you say, well, they do not...

suck it out of their thumb for these proposals. They do it because somebody is trying to nudge them to do something to their single advantage. sometimes I do not envy those civil servants because on day one, on Monday morning, they have the TPPs asking for time. In the afternoon, the banks come, then some other banking groups come, some other TPPs come with it.

slightly different business model, slightly different wishes. And then suddenly say, hmm, we think there's a problem. I think we should regulate. OK, OK, we should regulate. But what and how? then also, so the problem is that if you don't have a solution first, but all individually go to complain or have demands at the regulator or the Commission, the one that makes the proposals.

we triggered that regulator process ourselves as market participants. It doesn't just appear out of thin air, right?

Michael Salmony 28:33

Yeah, yeah.

Ralf Ohlhausen 28:34

Yeah, but you know, what we and maybe a big shout out to I have to do it before I'm coming across ⁓ wrongly. So, DG FISMA in particular has been really, really helpful and very engaged and forward looking and everything I think we could ask for from our perspective.

And it's an and working day and night and hard etc. So when I have I get emails on Saturdays and Sundays there so they are they are not at all the type of civil servants that many people think are sitting there in Brussels. So on that off the table, nevertheless.

And yes, of course, they get lobbied from left and right. So but it's not so much about how they should then regulate because one wants it this way, the other one wants it the other way. But what not to regulate or what to regulate or what not to regulate and not then getting, you know, ⁓ shifted left and right depending on who who is shouting louder.

Gijs Boudewijn 29:34

But then Ralf,

yeah, but then, yeah, now I'm trying to shout out. That brings me then, and I think that's what you or Michael said before, then the regulator, let's say, or the commissioner say, okay, guys, we've heard both sides. We do believe something should be done. What we are going to do is just regulate a base layer to sort of enable stuff to happen on top of that. But...

the business models and everything else. And this is sort of, if you look at SPAA, we took the PSD2 baseline and then through a scheme, private scheme on top. and then the trick is where does this base layer end and say, okay, this is how far we will go as a regulator, just as an enabling foundational layer, full stop and all other detailed stuff.

Michael Salmony 30:31

done by the

Gijs Boudewijn 30:32

including

business models, we leave it up to the market. Good luck. We have laid the foundation. Now it's up to competitive forces to create good solutions,

Ralf Ohlhausen 30:41

And that's exactly what we're sorry, Michael, one more thing, but one more thing to finish. I'll stop after that, but it's exactly what we wanted and what I was hoping that we could agree with the banks and insurance companies, et cetera, for open finance. So all we need is that the law mandates access or basically allows customers to access their data. That's it 24x7. And then everything else could be left to the market.

Gijs Boudewijn 30:43

Hahaha!

Michael Salmony 31:06

No, I think we agree on a number of things. I mean, one is that we've been a little bit rude about some of the regulations. There's a lot of benefit to regulation, right? Maybe we'd never have got instant payment. We wouldn't have got privacy. We wouldn't have got people stopping ⁓ AIs harvesting content. I mean, we wouldn't have safety belts. We'd probably still be sending children up chimneys if it weren't for regulation. So regulation is a great thing.

The only question I think we're discussing is a how far should it go? Right? Maybe only the base layer and let the industry do. And the, the other question, which I don't think either of you have answered, if I may say so is if the problem is seen, why is the initial reflex always to say we must regulate? Cause another option might be just to bring people together and say, okay, look, there's this new idea of fintechs and they use APIs and how can we make this work? And you lock.

Gijs Boudewijn 31:52

Convene.

Michael Salmony 32:01

banks and fintechs in a room to work out a joint, so maybe you don't need to regulate at all. You just bring people together. Is that incredibly naive or do you think that actually happens?

Gijs Boudewijn 32:11

No, it's

not, because basically this is what happened with SEPA. We had a problem with ⁓ expensive and slow cross-border payments in Europe. Well, know, at my age, you know how this all came about, decades of discontent about what banks did to cross-border payments. And finally, they got the message. And then we started to build SEPA. that was a clear sort of division of labor. The industry said,

Okay, okay, we got the message. We need to standardize. We will develop the standards in the European Payments Council as market investment. You, dear Commission, you create a harmonized legal framework because we need that, especially for the direct debits, to make that happen because we need one uniform legal framework. And the last one was that the European Central Bank needed to build a nice settlement system called Target.

that is a plan upfront, this is the result we want to achieve, there's a clear division of labour, there's an institutional layer, which is the legal framework that you, the base layer that I was talking about. But then first you need to sit down together with all involved, guys, what is the problem, how can we, who are the actors, what are we going to regulate, what is up to the domain of the market participants, but agree upfront on the full picture and agree.

This is what we want to achieve. This is what we will do through legislation. And the rest is with some nudging. It's up to market participants to make it a success. And that is, think, a process that could come out of your convening. Somebody has to convene an ecosystem that these are the people that we have to get around the table. And this is what is the plan? We need to make a joint plan for and inevitably it's going to be a public-private partnership.

Michael Salmony 33:43

Wonderful.

Hmm.

Gijs Boudewijn 34:02

because there will be some public stuff in forms of regulation and some private stuff. And there's still the question about a business model and funding. I mean, it's no more complicated than that.

Michael Salmony 34:13

Perfect. And the convener can't be MasterCard, right? Or it can't be some neutral. yeah. Do you have any further thoughts because we're gradually coming to the end of our time here?

Gijs Boudewijn 34:17

No, no, that should be the Commission.

Well, yeah.

Ralf Ohlhausen 34:27

Yeah,

I fully agree with that. Fully agree. Yeah, sorry. Okay, maybe not. I won't say it now. No, no, I think overall, this is exactly and I said it earlier, orchestration is what we need, ⁓ not regulation.

Gijs Boudewijn 34:30

No, don't say that, Ralf. No, come on.

Michael Salmony 34:38

Thank

Okay, then ⁓ thank you again. ⁓ What a lively episode again we've had this time on a slightly different topic. It was about sort of industrial policy, maybe the idea of the state as a convener, and maybe about leapfrog, about thinking of things we're really good at and which others could then catch us up on, rather than us always following and trying to do a Google Cloud or something that others have already become entrenched on.

Gijs Boudewijn 34:56

the

Michael Salmony 35:12

Okay, so thank you very much again to Ralf and Gijs and thank you for watching and I hope you enjoyed that and look forward seeing you at the next episode.