Systèmes de paiement électronique, régime monétaire et intermédiation bancaire *

Abstract

About the Internet, there have been a number of indications recently, that the use of electronic methods not only for expanding business or creating new business, but also for making payments, may introduce a new " industrial and monetary " order. This idea, (millenarianism ?) implies a large adoption of new technologies, of e-business opportunities and usages and finally, the resolution of e-payment problems, especially taking into account the Internet's characteristics (decentralization and aperture). These problems do not depend only on implementation of information's technologies, cryptography or network management. Because payments concern the core of the market's economy, the e-payment systems involve i) the monetary regime - i.e. forms and nature of money creation - and ii) agents qualified to create money. On these points, the emergence of e-payment systems is not anodyne, because it participates in the evolution of the actual monetary regime in the direction of a weakening between money supply, quantity of money and economy financing by bank's credit. It participates also in the evolution of the " banking industry " in the direction of a real disintermediation.