아이슬란드의 새로운 결제 체계 - 주권적이고 안전한 결제 시스템 구축

For a small, highly digital economy – such as Iceland – payment sovereignty does not mean self-sufficiency. It means combining international shelter with domestic resilience and ensuring, to the extent possible, that neither becomes a single point of failure.

That is the central proposition I want to discuss with you today. Iceland’s payment system is fast, efficient and highly digital. Instant payments have been the norm for decades and interbank payments have been efficiently routed through a localized system from a foreign vendor. Importantly, payments for goods and services are made almost exclusively by cards, through the global networks of Visa and Mastercard. Critically, domestic rails for debit card transactions that played and important role during the banking failures of the Global Financial Crisis have given way to foreign rails. Cash use is very low, and broadly adopted account-to-account solutions have not emerged as they have in many other countries in the region.

The result is a system that is robust but fragile, as it depends on a small number of providers, common technical infrastructure and continuous digital connectivity. Critical services are provided outside Icelandic jurisdiction, and our links with the outside world depend heavily on subsea cables. In a more fragmented geopolitical environment, where political prioritise often lead economic statecraft, efficiency can no longer be the only design criterion. Resilience must stand alongside it to ensure digital sovereignty, financial stability and economic security.

International shelter and domestic resilience

Through the European Economic Area, Iceland is closely integrated with Europe, with full access to the Single Market and a common legal framework, including for financial services. Yet it remains outside the EU, the euro area and therefore the Banking Union. This position—closely connected but not fully within Europe’s financial safety net—shapes our response to a changing global order and growing reliance on a small number of global critical service providers.

Our strategy, to counter the effects of this changing environment, has two mutually reinforcing parts. The first is international shelter: participation in large, trusted infrastructures where scale, expertise and common standards strengthen security. The second is domestic resilience: the ability to route payments through more than one channel, maintain essential services during disruption, recover quickly and clarify responsibilities across institutional boundaries.

This is resilience through diversification, credible fallbacks and tested cooperation. International integration gives us depth and scale. Domestic capability gives us control over critical functions when circumstances depart from the ordinary. In practice, this means diversifying payment methods and infrastructure; maintaining critical domestic capabilities; and strengthening coordination among the Central Bank, financial institutions, infrastructure providers and other public authorities. Real resilience arises through cooperation between central institutions of society and private actors that provide systemically important services.

The Central Bank must be central to this effort due to its broad responsibilities for the payments system, financial stability and supervision. The Bank has therefore a role both as a provider of critical infrastructure and as a supervisor with macro-oversight responsibilities for systemically important critical infrastructure and a micro-supervisory role with increased responsibilities in recent years, including through the implementation of DORA in Icelandic law.

We do not seek to provide every service, but we will fulfil our responsibility for the resilience of the whole system. We can identify system-wide dependencies, set common objectives, convene the relevant actors and ensure that contingency arrangements are tested against severe but plausible disruptions. Where necessary, we should also help private-sector participants weigh the wider benefits of resilience, which may otherwise attract too little investment, against its more readily quantifiable upfront costs.

To put these principles into practice, we have identified seven critical services and assessed the risks they face. This is only the first step. We must also determine who needs continued access, how quickly each service should be restored, how long it must remain operational and under what conditions. In a small economy, concentration and uniformity often create the greatest vulnerabilities. Responsibilities must therefore be clear, fallback arrangements credible, and preparedness tested before a crisis occurs.

The Central Bank is working on initiatives to fulfil its extensive mandate in this field. These can broadly be categorised in three parts.

Payment continuity gets the most attention. Here we are both focusing on strengthening existing routes and establishing new payment rails. We see cash an im