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Thanks a ton but I strongly suspect the bankers concerned, at either or both ends, don't know half of all these details of SWIFT! Yes, as I too mentioned, it's a problem with field length but bank attributes to SWIFT, so who knows. I've been hearing about ISO20022 for ~15 years. High time I added it to my Fintech Waiting for Godot list:) 

Delay is bad but the proposed move to delay first time payments by 24h is not as harebrained as it's made out to be.

We've waiting for digital identity like Samuel Beckett's protagonist was Waiting for Godot. Even if one existed, I doubt if it'd be any easier for the lay Payer to verify the digital identity of the Payee than it is to verify their real world identity. As we've seen, Confirmation of Payee is harder than first imagined and its implementation is delayed to next year. When I was involved in FPS implementation, I recall a scheme rule that said Receiving Bank would face a penalty if it failed to credit a payment to Payee's account within 2 hours (or was it 15 seconds?). So far there's no evidence that APP fraud involves a single account receiving multiple credits in a short while. Besides, there are several genuine businesses (e.g. events) where it's perfectly normal to receive multiple credits into an account in a short duration. Holding Receiving Bank responsible is not a solution. 

End of the day, APP fraud is caused by Payers being careless. Best solution is to educate them to be careful. Since such Payers constitute vote bank, lawmakers won't have the guts to tell them they won't get bailed out for their carelessness. Against that backdrop, delaying payments by 24h is perhaps the next best solution. 

I recently told my customer in the USA to transfer the payment to my company, GTM360 MARKETING SOLUTIONS PRIVATE LIMITED. His bank's cross-border fund transfer system didn't support such a long payee name, presumably because SWIFT, the underlying messaging platform, didn't. He thought PRIVATE LIMITED  was the US equivalent of INC and changed the payee name to GTM360 MARKETING SOLUTIONS INC. The money came to my bank in India, where it was rejected because of mismatch in payee name.

I say this was a failure in SWIFT system. I'm sure SWIFT would claim it was caused by "incorrect data inputs". 

How to settle this debate?

24h delay in FPS payments would slow down online ecommerce and bill payments, leading to a day's delay in shipment and due dates of utility payments etc. As far as I can see, we can live with that. However, such a delay would effectively kill the use of FPS-based payment methods for instore payments at supermarkets and other brick-and-mortar stores. 

Yo @FinextraMember at 18:42: Hope you're right! If so, it will restore my faith in free market capitalism. Especially since it would prove that buyers still have power even under an alleged monopoly / duopoly situation.

Uh oh, a year ago, I'd lauded Kroger's move here. Sad to say its gambit didn't play out. I strongly suspect that the retailer got carried away by the fintech buzz and tried to find alternative payment methods. And realized, as we've seen repeatedly over the last decade, that there just isn't any cheaper alternative to credit / debit cards that are equally popular with consumers.

While the ability to deposit funds into drivers' bank accounts as soon as the ride is complete could be a competitive advantage, it would also mean Uber loses the float it used to enjoy by holding on to the money in its own account for a few days (or weeks as Uber drivers in India have recently started complaining). This would tend to push the loss-making Uber further into losses. Hope the company has a plan to prevent that from happening. Wall St seems to be losing patience with loss making tech giants these days.

In my post Apple Puts Banks Squarely At The Center Of Mobile Payments that I wrote the day after Apple Pay was launched in 2014, I listed five reasons why I thought Apple Pay was the most frictionless digital payment and poised to become the #1 digital payment. It has taken longer than I expected but at last Apple Pay's performance has resonated with my prediction. 

In some ways, Apple Pay's accomplishment is even more noteworthy than it sounds, considering that it's just a payment method whereas Starbucks is really an ordering-cum-loyalty app masquerading as a mobile payment.

Banning HFT is like banning the Ferraris and Porches of the world because their drivers would reach the same destination ahead of others driving more commonplace cars. But your view does resonate with the one expressed by Michael Lewis in his bestseller The Flash Boys. Just that I disagree. I'm in tech and one of tech's value props is that it gives unfair advantage to its buyers! As long as the said tech is available for purchase to anyone, it can't be banned just on the grounds of being costly.

Good solution but I wonder if it's too late. Between the Merchant (e.g. Amazon), third party digital wallets (e.g. PayTM, PayZapp, PayPal), and auto-fill browser extensions (e.g. Chrome, LastPass), my card is on file somewhere or the other. I don't remember the last time I entered my credit card info on any website.