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not being completely dependent of commercial parties for all payments and the ability to pay anonymously. The use of physical cash becomes increasingly harder due to decline of ATMs and cash is not accepted everywhere anymore.

I'm not surprised and it confirms what we have experienced in the market. Note that this survey is related to cororate banks and not retail banks. Corporates expect banks to meet their specific needs and if not, they switch to a bank (or Fintech company) that can. Large corporate banks have bad experiences in being locked in by 'closed' system from software vendors. When the bank wants to implement a specific feature that the vendor's product doesn't cover, it completely depends on that vendor to have it added (or not). To avoid this dependency, an increasing number of banks has plans to build their own technology stack/frameworks on basis of which they can build their own specific functionality. But this is easier said than done. Building a mature and proven framework takes easily 4 to 5 years before its is mature enough for a widescale implementation and requires many millions of investment. Not mentioning the risks of failure or rework that comes with it. But there is also good new. New generation technlogy frameworks from vendors offer banks the best of both worlds. The bring a proven, mature and ready to use domain (e.g. payments) specific frameworks with a large amount of out-of-the-box functionality, but based on an open architecture that allows the IT team of a bank to add the bank's own specific functionality/features without being dependent on the vendor. This approach saves the banks a lot of time, investment and risk, but at the same time offers the same amount of flexibility and vendor independency as a complete self build from scratch. Interested? Please, do not hesitate to contact us. 

For 7 transactions per second, it is still a lot of energy.

I fully agree with Steve's statement on the 'secure enclave of the mobile phone'. This technology is already used by payment schemes like Apple Pay and Android Pay. The key issue is that this capability is not made available/accessible to any party/App, but only to the ones that are permissioned by the owner of the phone eco-system. The question is whether legislation should be created that force the owners/controlers of the phone eco-system to open up the 'secure enclave' to any party that wants to make use of it, in the same way banks (ASPSP) have been forced to open up the payment account. The application area and value of this 'secure enclave' goes way beyond payments, but can be applied for every type of (2F) authentication and digital signing.

The Libra is a stable coin that can only be acquired by bringing in a deposit in a fiat currency. From that perspective it does not create a new asset or money, it is only another appearance of fiat currency, similar to bank notes. The interesting part is that it is not linked to one fiat currency (like most stable coins), but to a basket of multiple fiat currencies. The most well known basket currency so far has been the ECU (European Currency Unit, which was the stepping stone to the Euro), another one is the SDR. Important benefit of a basket currency is that the rate movements against the individual fiat currencies in the basket are smoothened and less volatile than the rates between the fiat currencies. At the end of the day the total value of all Libras that have been sold, must be covered by the deposits that have been made by the buyers of the Libra in the different fiat currencies.

According the Libra white paper all Libras are backed with fiat currencies that are placed in deposit at the moment someone buys Libra coins. The Libra foundation needs to take care that these deposits are held in custody in such a way that the market risk is as minimal as possible. This means spread across accounts held with different banks or other save-haven assets. The foundation needs to take care that there is enough liquidity available when Libra holders want to exchange them into fiat currency again. As financial oversight authority you rightfully may be concerned about this, but I do not see how this is much difference than people holding money on a PayPal account. If the Libra foundation would apply for a banking license in every country of which the currency participates in the Libra, would that change their mind? In the EU a Euro Libra would fall officially under eMoney institution legislation which makes it possible that non-banks are issuing eMoney that is backed up with deposits.

In my perception a stablecoin backed with deposits of underlying fiat currency (or in case of Libra the currencies that are part of the basket) would fall in the EU under the e-Money institution directive. Any thoughts or PoVs on this?

In 1996 the SET consortium was established by Visa, Mastercard, Microsoft, IBM, Netscape and others. They jointly created the SET standard and was supposed to become the de-facto standard to secure payments and other electronic transactions conducted via the internet. SET would be supported by the different browsers (at that time mainly Netscape and Microsoft) so that man-in-the-middle attacks were not possible. Apparently, the technology was too early/complex/expensive for wide adoption and conflict of interests too strong, which caused that it never became the overall transaction security standard that one had envisioned. As a result, alsmost 25 years later we are still facing multiple 'standards' and difficulties implementing SCA (like for PSD2).

12 million customers with 1,700 employees (spread over 4 countries). Pretty impressive efficiency ratio.

@Barrie. I agree with you asessment. The Libra is not conditional for Facebook (and others) to step into the lending market (especially lending to finance consumer purchases can be low hanging fruit for them). But every activity in credit business requires a banking license. The Libra can be an attractive means of funding for them as the deposits on Libra accounts do not bear interest (like deposits on PayPal accounts).