Electronic money in the light of Turkish and European Union regulations

Throughout human history, money has been and still is a commodity that keeps and increases its importance. Up to the present it had a variety of forms. Before money people used barter method to make payments. Over the time majority of people needed same things, therefore turning barter method obsolete, and thusly barter method evolved into commodity money. In commodity money system some precious metals came forward because of their durability. After then, people started to give value to these metals apart from their function and this leads people to metallic currency. At some point carrying and protecting these metals have begun to constitute a serious problem and people started using banknotes to represent them. After some time, representation function phased out and banknote became valuable by itself, therefore paper money system emerged. Couple of decades ago money have begun to digitalize. Money, which is no longer a concrete material but a number of digits on bank accounts, is used by electronic cards. Electronic money has emerged in this flow and got people's interest in a short time. To regulate electronic money, legislation efforts has been started years ago and law, regulation, communiqués have been made and legal infrastructure of the concept have been constituted. Purpose of this thesis is to examine the relatively new concept of electronic money through both national legislations and European Union Directives. In this thesis, first the concept of money is examined briefly and then the concept of electronic money clarified through its definition, features, examples and legislations about the issue. In the legal aspect of the thesis European Union Directives and Turkish regulations about the issue are explained and compared with each other.