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The last time I checked, there were < 5M users of Open Banking in EU / UK. That does seem underwhelming when compared with 80M users of "Open Finance" in USA without any regulation in place. 

But success or failure must be judged vis à vis goals.   

Can anyone point to any source where success criteria of Open Banking has been published?

LOL rich of you to stay anonymous and talk about my parents. But I won't hold your upbringing against you.

Merchants incur lower processing cost for debit card compared to credit card, yet I don't know a single merchant who passes on the lower debit interchange by way of discount to consumers paying with debit card. Likewise, they may not pass on the higher cost of BNPL to consumers. 

When I pay fees or interest for other forms of loans, the merchant can still pass on some cost or the other to the general public.

None of this is under your or my control. 

Therefore, as long as I don't pay any explicit fees or interest for BNPL, it's Free Credit. Period. 

ICYMI, merchants pay higher MDR for BNPL because it improves their browser-to-buyer conversion rate and helps them to save on other forms of marketing costs. 

Happy to say but I told you so!

Upside Of Brexit For IT Industry

The same merchants who rant against 2-3% MDR for Credit Card are happily forking out 4-6% MDR for BNPL, which is enough for BNPLs to offer Free Credit. It doesn't look too good to be true.   

At the peak of Online P2P Lending mania a few years ago, I remember Disruptionistas raving about alternative credit scoring models based on social media profile etc. and threatening banks with extinction for using their dowdy old FICO credit scoring models.

It tickles me that the the wheel has come full circle, with people now questioning the alternative credit scoring models used by BNPLs.

@MelvinHaskins:

Please see previous post linked on first line for exact problem definition.

Even where banks display all outstanding direct debits, not all of them let you cancel a direct debit without asking you to first contact the merchant; not all subscription providers accept bank account as funding source, instead insisting on credit card.

While you may not face any problem in this space, it's evident from People want Subscription Management from their Bank and the numerous sources cited in my previous post that there are a number of others who do.

So much so that there has been a spate of regulation in California (CCPA), India (Emandate), USA (UNSUBSCRIBE Act) to prevent subscription traps. This will be the subject of my next blog post in this series.

Oh c'mon, it's not like every consumer has worked out their repayment plan when they say "put it on my card" at the checkout - and that's on credit card with 24-36% APR. Ditto Payday Loans. In contrast, most BNPL is Zero Interest - what's not to like about it?

This BNPL Dunking Campaign reeks of the involvement of banks who haven't understood BNPL and are losing out big time to Affirms & Klarnas who, unlike themselves (banks), are VC funded and can accept losses / miniscule profits for a long time in the pursuit of growth in loan volumes.

All was so quiet on the Confirmation of Payee front for years after it was announced that I wondered if it became a fall guy of the pandemic. Good to know that's not the case. Kudos to countries and banks that are implementing CoP.

LOL screen scraping reminds me of TCP/IP. So many things wrong about  both of them in theory but, decades after experts dunked on them, these  two technologies still drive the Internet and most Open Finance applications used in practice today respectively.

Crypto / DeFi positions itself as an alternative to traditional financial system and postures to eliminate Visa / MasterCard / Banks and other intermediaries in the current financial system. It's lame if it should then need the support of banks. 

On a side note, people booked hotel rooms and paid for sandwiches with Bitcoin in S3E13 of the TV show THE GOOD WIFE. Ergo crypto went mainstream by your definition in 2012, which is when this episode aired. It's another story that crypto went off mainstream after that!

Amazon already offers an A2A payment method in India: Amazon Pay operating over UPI / IMPS rails. Since the #ZeroMDR reg came into effect from 1 Jan 2020, UPI payments attract zero processing costs. 

For ages, retailers have incurred lower processing cost for debit card versus credit card but I still haven't come across a single retailer who passes that lower cost on to consumers.

Of course, Amazon is not like other retailers. On second thoughts, since it does not give any discount or additional loyalty points on A2A compared to credit card payment, maybe Amazon is not so unlike other retailers.