Payment
In economics, payment (French: payement) is the transfer of money from the debtor liable to pay to the payee (creditor). Payment is one of the most important economic transactions that always involve money. In the payment sense, money is cash, book money or money surrogates. Money payment debts in the sense of cash debts are generic debts of a special kind. Usually - but not always - a payment is made for the purpose of discharging a monetary debt. However, the gift of cash is also a payment without a monetary debt to be discharged or consideration to be expected. Under section 241(1) of the Civil Code, the creditor of a monetary debt can demand performance from the debtor, which the debtor can provide by acting in the form of a monetary payment. Under section 243(2) of the Civil Code, a debtor is discharged from his pecuniary debt as soon as he has undertaken what is necessary on his part to make payment. For this purpose, according to section 270 (1) of the Civil Code, within the framework of the risk of performance, he must ensure that the money is available to the creditor at his domicile or place of business.
In the case of cash payments, only banknotes are subject to an unlimited acceptance obligation by the creditor; in the case of euro coins, on the other hand, according to the third sentence of Article 11 of EC Regulation 974/98, "with the exception of the issuing authority (...) no one is obliged to accept more than fifty coins in a single payment". A payment by book money or monetary surrogates is accepted by the creditor as soon as he consents to the crediting of his bank account or expresses consent by means of an account reference on his letterhead of the business letter or his invoice.
History
Roman law used the word "dissolution of debt" (Latin solutio) to refer to the termination of a debt relationship by redemption (Latin liberatio). The debt relationship ended with the payment of the monetary debt. It was not until the Middle Ages that the Old High German "zalōn" and the Middle High German "zaln" came into being, both of which meant "to execute arithmetically, to present according to the rules of the art of numbers". The amount of payment was determined by a counting board, so that this process of paying off a debt was called payment.
The "Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon Aller Wissenschafften und Künste" by Johann Heinrich Zedler from 1749 deals with the concept of payment in great detail and defines payment as "restitution of what one owes to another, and occurs when one satisfies one's creditor either with cash or by settlement, instruction and the like". In 1794, the jurist Christoph Christian von Dabelow understood a payment to mean the cancellation of a debt by the payment of money. The jurist Julius Albert Gruchot (1805-1879) pointed out as early as 1871 that a payment was to be regarded as a legal transaction because it consisted of two concurrent declarations of intent by the payer and payee.
For the business economist Konrad Mellerowicz in 1952, payment was "any giving of money". With regard to the purpose of payment, he distinguished between consideration for a delivery (goods, machines, securities), performance (rent, wages, insurance premiums) and unilateral public debt relationships (taxes, customs duties, social security).
Laws today use the terms payment and repayment very frequently, but do not offer a legal definition. For example, the retention of title in Section 449 (1) of the German Civil Code (BGB) presupposes that the seller retains title to the goods until the purchase price has been paid. Payment is at the core of payment services law, which speaks of the payment transaction in Section 675f BGB.
Payment Services Law
The payment services law applicable in all EU Member States obliges credit institutions ("payment service providers") under Section 675f (1) of the German Civil Code (BGB) to execute a payment transaction from the payer to the payee in the case of a single payment contract. Pursuant to Section 675f (3) BGB, a payment transaction is any provision, transmission or withdrawal of funds, irrespective of the underlying legal relationship between the payer and the payee. A payment order is any order given by a payer to his payment service provider to execute a payment transaction either directly or indirectly through the payee. The payment transaction is initiated between the credit institutions involved by booking the payment, which results in an expense for the payer by debiting the account and a corresponding income for the payee by crediting the account.
