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Surely it is quite wrong for anyone who has been involved in the Payment Strategy Forum New Payment Architecture stream to move straight onto the board of the organisation charged with delivering it (NPSO)?

In the minutes of the July meeting of the PSF two individuals, who now have senior positions at NPSO, were noted as making important interventions wearing their previous hats at a time when they must surely have known that they would shortly be wearing hats of the organisation that they were then devising the requirements for.

One was actually the person in charge of the NPA stream and Blueprint. The other made an intervention about risk management. In both cases these interventions can be read as adding assurance that the project will go forward and their new seats will be available for them.

Where is the transparency? These people should have declared their interest as soon as they knew of it, announced it at a PSF meeting, had it recorded in the minutes and immediately recused themselves.

This adds to the impression that there is no chance of meaningful changes to NPA or even abandonment of it as a result of the "consultation" which has just closed. The same meeting minutes from the PSF July 12 meeting show that attendees, when addressing the PSF’s H2 2017 programme plan, felt it was necessary to insert a task absent from the papers they were looking at: “FR and DG noted that ‘handover’ should not just entail a consultation response document but a final and detailed NPA blueprint, that builds on the consultation responses and the further design work being undertaken in H2”. In other words the envisaged task was to send a report on the consultation but not alter the Blueprint.

The H2 PSF programme plan is very light on analysis of the consultation responses, rather than collating what they were: the Blueprint is to be handed over to NPSO in final form in December, it is now October. Presumably collating the consultation responses will take a month - leaving at most one month to think about and address the consultation responses, and propose and agree changes to the Blueprint based on them.

Indeed, the action point taken away by EY from that note in the July minutes was simply “EY to ensure that the final ‘handover’ deliverable is a final and detailed NPA blueprint” and this was the only open item in the PSF Action Log presented to its meeting on 29th September, but without the critical condition “that builds on the consultation responses and the further design work being undertaken in H2”.

This evidence plus the condensed timescale preclude any possibility that the Blueprint will be meaningfully altered, let alone abandoned, as a result of the consultation responses so the consultation is in essence an awkward inconvenience before the PSF's team on NPA can settle into their new seats as the NPSO team on NPA.

The Programme Update given to the PSF 29th September meeting pre-disclosed impressions of the consultation reponses on two sub-streams (Trusted KYC Data Sharing and Payments Transaction Data Sharing and Data Analytics).The PSF was advised that the consultation responses were supportive, so that the planned actions subsequent to the consultation could be put in hand at once, although there is a wave in the direction of having a further glance at the responses.

This is quite a wrong of going about things.

A proper analysis of the responses should be made available to all interested parties and at the same time, with access to underlying data, but instead we have partial and edited results being leaked to the project sponsor and actions being taken as a consequence.. and we don't have enough distance between the people writing the requirements (PSF) and the people delivering on them (NPSO).

Once a proper consultation report is available, there should be a process where the consultation responses are debated and processed, and the Blueprint adapted, but that is clearly not the intention of the PSF and the NPSO, and both the timing and the evidence point to a rubber-stamping exercise.

This is quite wrong for a project that has national importance.

It might be helpful to know what interest, tax, depreciation and amortization were, so as to judge what the net loss was, and how it compares to the full-year 2016 figure. There is also a need to clarify what EBITDA2 means as opposed to EBITDA. In my understanding EBITDA2 is the EBITDA just for Q2 2017, meaning that the annualised figure would be quadruple the £2.4 million for Q2 alone: a annualised loss of £9.6 million, far worse than the impression of an improvement implied by the figure in brackets of Full-Year EDITDA loss of £6.9 million.

Sorry I don't agree with most of what you have written here. The FCA did not exist when Faster Payments was launched. BIC codes are less complex than email addresses; they usually only have 8 characters rather than 12-20, and they follow a more predictable pattern of [4 bank]+[2 country]+[2]. Banks link themselves, using RMA; the customer does not have to do it and it only needs doing once per pairing of banks, not for every payment. Many FIN transactions conclude in near real-time; otherwise they could not be used for CLS. Regarding SEPA, a meaningful proportion of cross-border SEPA trafiic is transmitted over SWIFTNet FileAct and indeed SEPA has "significantly improved the transfer of cashless payments across borders within the continent", which, though, represent only 2% of traffic. But SEPA has done very little for the 98% domestic part, where the service level has remained static or gone down: most of the domestic traffic is not transmitted over SWIFT. It is true that "Sweden and Singapore have implemented similar systems" to FPS and I believe Vocalink is heavily involved there, but SWIFT is heaviliy involved in one you have not mentioned - Australia. Lastly, as a generality, the roadblock for SMEs in exporting is not paying: it's usually the importer that does that.

Very surprising to see institutional amnesia as to how toxic a brand NatWest + Markets is (derivatives losses, Blue Arrow...). At least neither County nor Capital have been dusted off to join in, nor NWIB (NatWest Investment Bank, the re-naming of County NatWest Capital Markets).

Dear Anish - from the authorities' perspective I think this deal is meant to go hand-in-hand with the scheme companies going regularly to tender on the provision of infrastructure, such that players like STET and Equens could bid against Vocalink on the provision behind LINK, FPS and BACS, and presumably Vocalink could try to bid for Cheque&Credit and even CHAPS, but then at the same time the PSF's Payments Strategy anticipates that (i) the BACS, FPS and Cheque&Credit scheme companies will merge - so will they merge their schemes in some way and reduce the number of contracts to be tendered for? and (ii) there should be a single Simplified Payments Platform that sounds very much like Distributed Ledger, and the "schemes" would be "overlay services" on top of this SPP, so there would not necessarily be a central infrastructure at all.

On that basis Mastercard may have bought a cash cow, or a sunset business, who knows. 

No not so, Lu, if it meets the requirements, but I can imagine a lot of tech-vertigo and reaching for the touchstone of the MT940 specs for fields 61 and 86. "Richer data" - that's 8*35 isn't it? Yes, banks need an Enterprise Integration Application.. where's Sungard MINT when you need it?

Excellent, Lu. Do we know what the risk is that the EBA will issue standards that conflict with the Open Date Institute API and then, being European law, trump it (assuming that the UK is still in the EU)? And we are just talking about account statement information, aren't we, so that the EBA may choose to state ISO20022 camt in the same way that the SEPA Migration End Date Regulation specified ISO20022 pain for file-based customer2bank and ISO20022 pacs for all bank2CSM2anotherCSM2bank??

Best not bite the hand that feeds you. Moven makes a point that amounts held with it up to $250,000 are insured by the FDIC: "That's a briefcase full of money". Where can you get that much in readies? Surely only from a bricks-and-mortar branch, even if it is in some remote part of Kansas, like 109 E Main St, Weir (where the issuer of the Moven card resides)

Best not bite the hand that feeds you. Moven makes a point that amounts held with it up to $250,000 are insured by the FDIC: "That's a briefcase full of money". Where can you get that much in readies? Surely only from a bricks-and-mortar branch, even if it is in some remote part of Kansas, like 109 E Main St, Weir (where the issuer of the Moven card resides).

Please could you rewrite this article in Fortune Cookie format (ISO666). It would help comprehensibility, at least down here on Planet Earth. Thank you.