Vatican officials will meet next week with Italian bank-security
experts, with a goal of ending a freeze on bank-card transactions inside
Vatican City.
The Vatican, which has worked for months to meet European banking
standards for preventing money-laundering, was caught off guard by a
January 1 announcement that Italy’s central bank would no longer process
bank-card transactions from the Vatican.
The Vatican hopes to persuade
Italian officials that new internal controls have satified the immediate
concerns of security officials, and Deutsche Bank—which had handled
bank-card transactions inside the Vatican—should be allowed to resume
processing those transactions.
The freeze on credit-card and ATM transactions has complicated life for
tourists at the Vatican and cut into sales at the Vatican Museums, post
office, and other shops.
The resort to cash-only business is costing the
Vatican an estimated $40,000 a day.