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Nice article.

Having written on the topic of multilingual support in sanctions screening systems, I'm aware of a bit of non-determinism at the periphery of sanctions screening. However, I was under the impression that the core of sanctions-screening was a deterministic process whereby the system looks up FATF whitelist / backlist once a day and takes a Go / NoGo decision about the payment.

Ergo, I was wondering how FCA's 100K sample would be able to distinguish the efficacy of sanctions screening between one bank and another.

Thanks to your point #3, TIL that there's fuzzy logic in sanctions screening, which makes the answer obvious.

@MelvinHaskins +1.

Hope the OP will enlighten us!

When its uses scraping à la US Open Banking, a fintech can get all the info that a logged user can access at its own speed and reliability whereas, when it uses API à la EU Open Banking, it's not only limited to the functionality provided by the bank, which I highlighted in the original post, but also to the speed and reliability of the bank, which became evident after I read this Fintextra article.

In Open Banking: EU v. USA, I highlighted one major limitation in the API approach of EU Open Banking versus the Scraping approach of US Open Finance: 

"When you use scraping, you can get all the info that the logged user can access whereas, when you use API, you're limited to what the bank provides via API."

This report provides another: Overdependency on banking infrastructure in reliability and speed.

In short, with API, you're limited to the functionality, reliability and speed provided by bank. 

This does not augur well for EU OB Fintechs since their major claim to fame was that they would deliver faster, better and cheaper apps than banks.

True dat.

In India, the Consumer / Payor has full control over the new UPI / eNACH autodebit instrument in terms of cancelling it anytime on bank website unlike the old ECS mandate for autodebit that required the payor to contact the merchant to make any changes. In that context, I can see why the new direct debit instrument is better than the old direct debit instrument for the Consumer.

Whereas, in UK, memory serves, I could go to bank website and cancel / modify the old direct debit mandates anytime. So VRP doesn't seem to provide any additional functionality for the Consumer / Payor.

I suspect VRP has some additional value proposition for the Merchant / Biller that is not widely talked about.

I get that the amount taken out will be according to pre-agreed limits (say £0-100) but I'm keen to know how the exact amount of a given payment (say £47, not £89) is decided at run time: (1) Is it manually entered by payor just before each payment is due? (2) Is it submitted by payee to bank for each payment? (3) Is it submitted upfront by payee to bank for all payments during the agreed tenure of the VRP mandate?

Can you please throw some light on this specific aspect of VRP? Thanks in advance.

Also, since bill amount is variable from one month to another, utility bill payment seems to be tailor-made for VRP but I've never heard of this use case in the context of VRP. 

How is this any different from SEPA ICT, which I believe was launched in 2017 and supports realtime payments in Euro across 36 countries in EU?

Open Banking in EU / UK was launched in 2017. Five years later, if it still seems new, it's because it hasn't exactly set the markets on fire?

OTOH, Open Finance in USA, which has been around for a shorter duration, is a blockbuster hit - even without any regulatory mandate for its implementation. 

Open Banking: EU v. USA

Market Cap became a thing for Fiat Stocks in the early 1990s. Given its gesturing of disrupting TradFi, it's very lame for Crypto / DeFi to use the same metric as a measure of its size 30 years later. Despite all its vaunted talent, why couldn't Crypto conjure up something like Community EBIDTA that a startup called WeWork in the very old world real estate industry did:)

Nope, sorry but it's still unreadable - the text is bleeding very badly:(.

I've noticed this problem when the canvas size is too high. I solve it by using a graphic manipulation tool like IrfanView to reduce the resolution of the image before publishing it online.