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Keen to know what role you see, if any, for A2A RTPs - like PayM, Zapp, Zelle, etc.- in the future of retail payments in UK, especially on the back of Open Banking. We only see one after the other A2A RTP in UK shutting down, latest being Barclays PingIt. 

Public Cloud surely has over 95% share of noise but many actual purchase transactions in the last six months or so run counter to the assertion made in the opening sentence of this article.  

Shaken up by hidden costs like Egress Charges in Public Cloud, many large companies have started going back to Onprem Infra like HPE Greenlake, just that they continue with public cloud infra's OPEX pricing model rather than onprem infra's standard CAPEX model. This includes FIs like Wells Fargo (Source) and Government agencies like UK.gov, which, 7 years after it mandated Cloud Only, has recently opened up its procurment to Onprem infra (Source).

Having done my graduation project on Monte Carlo modeling and simulation, I totally get how quantum computing could drive 1000x higher speeds. Goldman Sachs was a pioneer in algo trading, which exposed limitations even in the speed of light, and led to laying of new fiber optic cable between New York and Chicago in order to speed up options trades by a few milliseconds. I'm not surprised that the firm has been doing pioneering work on another frontier of technology like quantum computing.

This reinforces my long held view that, when it comes to boosting their own revenues and profits, banks and financial institutions are way ahead of other industries in using technology. It's only when it comes to using technology for improving CX that we can't say the same thing.

What exactly does the "first" in the title of the article mean?

This is the first ever cross-border RTP in the world? (AFAIK, it is, not counting the fictitious ones they show in movies where the ransom money is transferred in realtime to the kidnapper's offshore account and the "kidnappee" is released immediately.)

Or something else??

Sounds like an imminent train wreck. But, per reports, customers are not exactly lining up for Open Banking, so I guess EU / UK can take one more decade to get it right. 

On a side note, the US market offers an excellent example of how do open banking practically in the real world.

1. One or two or max three aggregators e.g. Plaid, Finicity, Yodlee.
2. Massive custom interface work for each bank burrowing into the deepest recesses of the systems of that bank to get the required information, no matter where it lies.
3. Outright phishing to harvest users's online banking credentials.
4. Scraping to extract data.
5. Restrict API only on the output side i.e. after all the data has been harvested, cleansed and harmonized.

India offers another example with select use cases like Payments (UPI), Bill Payment (BBPS), etc. These systems follow a more structured / less cowboy like approach. But, since 70% of the country's banking industry is owned by government, these quasi-state initiatives have benefited from "forced distribution" intio banks who can't pushback too much on regulatory diktat. 

Sr whnt. @matt_levine wondered if "April Fools’ Day lasts for months now". I saw it as the growing pervasiveness of Catch-22 / Milo Minderbinder ethos in modern times.  

"Ahead of time", "customer needs education", "behavior change is required", "it's not a milestone but a journey".  

I'm not suggesting causation vis-a-vis Open Banking but it'd be terribly naive to miss the strong correlation between these expressions and the euphemisms used to rationalize flopshow products.

To answer the question in the title of the post:

"Not only does crime pay, it’s just the cost of doing business." - @FortuneMagazine re. fine for price fixing slapped on Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) in the 1990s.

"Doubling" means "actual percentage" = 100%.

When I last heard, the actual nuimber of Open Banking users in UK (or EU?) was 3 million. 

FPS has been implemented by at least one UK bank that I know of which has a mainframe based customer accounting system running batch processes. I find it hard to believe that mainframe / batch processing prevents Real Time Payments.

For the last 5 years or so, I've been saying that the really compelling usage scenarios envisaged for Open Banking have been done in other countries - even within EU - without Open Banking regulation and, per contra, the other usage scenarios envisaged for OB are not so compelling, otherwise, they'd have been done without OB.

Four years ago, I commented here: "...the basic premise of Open Banking / PSD2 becomes somewhat questionable. Forget anti-climax, PSD2 offerings would be Dead on Arrival." 

Well, that's what seems to have happened.

Person A wants to open bank account, comes to bank, submits all KYC documents, bank issues the account. (AFAIK KYC documents don't tag someone as a fraudster.) A then defauds another Person B via APP fraud. I honestly don't see how the bank can be held culpable for issuing the account to this Person A. At best, if B produces a police complaint against B to bank, then bank should freeze A's account and disclose A's contact info to law enforcement. Othewise, bank would be exceeding its remit and violating its confidentiality agreement with A by doing anything to A's account - after all, A is fraudster to B but not to the Bank.