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According to LinkedIn Jean-Yves Rotté-Geoffroy is based in Sao Paolo. He will have to be registered at Companies House as a Non-Resident Director of NPSO Ltd - an indicator for Enhanced Due Diligence on the account holder and the individual, and even for withdrawal/denial of banking services, by many UK banks under current AML/CFT policies. NPSO will no doubt have to be getting its accounts opened in Lithuania or Cyprus instead, like the other Payments Market participants who have been de-risked, although - not itself being a Payment Service Provider within the meaning of PSD2 - it will be unable to make a complaint about its treatment to the PSR under the 2017 Payment Services Regulations Article 105.

I think that the answer to that, Ketharaman, is that it is in the nature of the EU "free market" that the authorities do not believe any market activity can be permitted to emerge into a scale business without the authorities taking a view and bringing it within the scope of regulation. The regulatory framework and process being what they are, there is then a 10 year delay and the resulting camel - which is what the RTS have become - is the original gift horse repeatedly re-designed by the various European committees.

A really good read: thank you for taking the trouble.

There is a fuller paper behind this blog and it is available via our company website: it is not possible to put a hyper- or bitly  link in here.

Yes funny, really revolutionary type of bank, this one: £1 billion of loans into the twilight zone of the UK mortgage market and £1 billion of deposits guaranteed by the UK taxpayer under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. The typical mortgage loan is for 25 years, but Atom's offer on its loans is considerably less than its bid on its deposits. The deposits are cleverly structured so as to fall outside Basel III Liquidity Coverage Ratio and Net Stable Funding Ratio, so the bank appears liquid under Basel III computations even though the average maturity of loans is over 20 years and the average maturity of deposits is about 18 months. The bank is an archetype of gaming the new Basel rules, but they cannot get away from the basics of Net Interest Income: if you pay more on deposits than you earn on loans, you will make a loss, and the greater the volume of business, the bigger the loss and the quicker you burn through your capital. Unfortunately if this bank goes down it will once again be the taxpayer that gets stiffed. So much for "Changing Banking for Good" and avoiding further instances of Northern Rock: thinly capitalised "challenger" banks (often from up in 't North or from Caledonia) aggessively building mortgage books at the low end of credit spectrum, overpaying for deposits, and running a glaring maturity mismatch.

"Of more than 2000 Brits quizzed, 27% have moved to an online or mobile-only bank already, while 26% are considering the switch" is a quite different message to "Brits flock to digital-only banks", and is misleading. The respondent may have understood the question as being "are you using online banking?"

How do away supporters make purchases in the ground, or are they not catered for?

The Blueprint for the New Payments Architecture for the UK foresees all payments being executed using an Authorised Push Payment rail. Direct debit, cheque ect will be reconstrued as overlay services on top of the single rail. Is this news on liability not of such gravity that the Blueprint needs to go back to its drawing board? If not, what is the justification for proceeding?

Hi Dirk - thanks: why am I not surprised about that news? It's a knee-jerk, easy answer, a good headline. Yanis Varoufakis proposed this, I believe, to enable Greece to manufacture money in parallel to having to comply with the Troika's austerity diktats, so that Greece could comply and bypass simultaneously. Didn't Ethereum sign something big with JPMorgan at SIBOS, and isn't JPMorgan is a prime dealer in Spanish government securities? Mr Buterin, if he had been asked by the Catalans, may already have taken a call from 270 Park Avenue NY to ask him which side of his 'pan' is 'mantequilla'd'.

And in the meantime major banks have cut off RMA completely for banks with whom no ASI relationship exists on either side (so-called "Non-customer RMA") and implemented RMA+ even with those counterparties where an ASI relationship does exist. This vastly reduces the possibility for MT103 'Cover' payments and indeed much else as well, such as reacting quickly to a customer request for MT101. The rump of remaining messaging that is allowed will indeed be well safeguarded, but at what cost to members and to the value of the network in the medium term? Surely there must be a better way than to cut into one's own flesh (ins eigene Fleisch schneiden, as they say in Germany)? I notice that this issue is not on the SIBOS agenda explicitly, or even implicitly: one supposes this is because the "regulatory guidance" behind it is taken as binding, even though in fact it does not come from regulators at all, but from the Wolfsberg Group.