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Job done - FT Headline just now "The euro falls to its lowest against the dollar since June 2010 after the ECB said it will stop accepting Greek sovereign bonds and other assets backed by the country’s government as collateral". That is alchemy in reverse ~ pure gold (central bank money) is revealed as base metal.

Will this new board resolve the alchemical issue of how Greek government bonds (other other GIPSI sovereigns) are still valued at par for TARGET2 purposes and in other Eurosystem operations when you can pick them up for 20-70% of face value from any bond broker?

Would this not mainly be benefits fraud? i.e. holding several NI numbers and claiming the same raft of benefits on each one. This number does not seem to have fallen since the Benefits Payment Automation Project from 1999, which eliminated the usage of girocheques and books of foils, on which there was no reconciliation by the Post Office and where the beneficiary name could be easily scrubbed out and typed over - leading to a big secondary market around the pubs and clubs.

Within the BPAP it was openly discussed that the real losses were 6 or 7 times as much as the published figures for benefits fraud at the time (£2 billion p.a. in 1999). For some reason this communications policy seemed to be accepted as normal.

The government diktat, signed I think by Harriet Harman, was that benefits payments should, by 2001, be moved onto a "modern, fast and efficient payment system: BACS", and be made into a bank account.

Since BACS wasn't capacious enough to handle the extra volumes (as well as arguably not being modern, fast or efficient), the project recommendations, from EDS and PwC, gave rise to the creation of Voca and a major investment in NewBacs, overseen by the original IT manager from the DWP Long Benton site in Newcastle.

This solution was deemed preferable politically to Peter Lilley's Single Benefits Card, or a National ID Card, or the replacement of the back-end computers. There was in essence one computer for each benefit, each with its own claimant database, and no reconciliation of the claimant to a central identification database - which would have uncovered the same person claiming multiple times. A complete replacement of the back-end systems was deemed too costly so it was instead decided to try and stem the outflow at the payment system level - and I guess that, if losses were really £14 billion in 1999, then £20 billion now, with inflation, represents a capping - result!

The figures quoted for Europe reflect the phase of the business cycle so they should not be a surprise, but at the same time they highlight the gap between current budgets and plans, and the IT spend that might be required to implement the SEPA Migration End Date in February 2014. Paul Styles of ACI recently, in these pages, drew attention to the current lack of focus and activity on SEPA, and these figures would seem to confirm that.

Hi Paul - yes, fully agreed, it is time for resolution and trust (although Resolution Trust was the organisation charged with liquidating defunct Savings & Loans, so maybe not the best name). However, the SMED timing is extremely tight and 2012 IT budgets probably do not contain large amounts for SEPA (or for anything!); one is unsure whether the authorities realise that. It will only be mid-year at the earliest when the national central banks issue their definitive lists of which schemes have to migrate by when; the definitive SMED should at least clarify whether users have to state IBAN+BIC or just IBAN. But then there may be a further wait to see which countries adopt the derogation rights over a delay in compelling users to put bulk files in XML, or allowing consumers to delay directly using IBAN(+/-BIC). And then there is the question of who will create the utilities needed to permit these derogations to operate in the customer-to-bank space but not in the bank-to-bank space. All this should really be defined by mid-year 2012 for the purposes of setting the 2013 budget and scoping and planning the IT work needed to create the target environment for migration (unless we believe that the environment already exists). If the banks do their IT work in first half of 2013 then it only leaves 7 months for migration/testing/conversion of the customers. With a 'Big Bang' end date for CT and DD of February 2014 when the market penetration now is 24% for SCT/1% for SDD, a miraculous last lap will be needed merely to achieve a modicum of compliance, let alone for banks to mutate into either Operational Excellence or Strategic Advantage (the two incarnations beyond Minimum Compliance). I am also of the opinion that there will be an additional large block of time elapsing during which national communities will define AOS to link the old to the new. No-one has ever done a comprehensive scoping of the data differences between SCT and all the legacy schemes that will appear on the central bank lists as correlating to it: the delta has to be filled with AOS or either the banks' or the customers' electonic processes fall down. Cheque, please!

Comment on the SIBOS experience from a market participant who will remain nameless: "Don't you feel like you are in The Matrix here in Toronto? It's where it was filmed. No sign of Morphius or Neo but there are a fair few peeps at the conference who look like Agent Smith". Lol at that one

Suppliers of uncertain reputation/financial longevity used over the last month: Crystal Palace FC, supplier of mounting boards for training certificates in Worcester, supplier of kite surfing harness, Air Transat (to fly to SIBOS), Wizz Airlines (to participate in a choir festival in Krakow) etc etc. With a Mastercard I don't need a Dun+Bradsteet report on any of these outfits...  

Yes it's a re-spray of SEPA Credit Transfer, that staggeringly successful financial innovation. Hw are you to know, Mr Steve Robson sir, whether the merchant is reputable or not? Or maybe the buyer's bank should guarantee the refund, and open a warehouse where the buyer can return the goods?

This needs better branding, how about EBA Step3, or may Eleanor, or even e-payments-plus, just a few names picked out of nowhere?

Martin Wilson, then Head of Vocalink Ventures and now CEO of Luup, and Paul Taylor, now an SVP at Bank of America in London, were the main internal sponsors of this initiative, so it is unfair to mention Fred Bar and not to mention these others, since Fred inherited a situation that was already unpromising.