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Great innovative idea, I think it was called the National Girobank and was the brainchild of Antony Wedgwood-Benn. Given all the talk about mobile payments at International Payments Summit in London this week, the next step should be a tie-up with a telephony operator, like maybe British Telecom, and the renaming of the resulting conglomerate as the General Post Office.

If we are considering the legacy of Thatcher-era privatisation at this opportune time and whether value was created or destroyed, this is a case study. National Girobank was privatised but could not be floated. It was sold off to Alliance & Leicester on the cheap. Alliance & Leicester did nothing with it and then went under itself. The splitting of the GPO destroyed enormous value. Now the Post Office starts again from square one. Ever decreasing circles?

This is not surprising. The SEPA Schemes destroy value for the user. Their sole benefit is harmonisation across the SEPA Area (do we still colour Cyprus in blue for that?).

It is important that these payments be subject to full anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing checks as a sine qua non. But the interests of the sender country do not stop there. Just like EU governments are looking askance at the business structures of the Googles and Starbucks of this world and why they pay little tax, so is it also legitimate for these same sender countries to examine Remittance payments and determine that the right amount of income tax and social contributions have been deducted at source, before the remitting individual is allowed to send  money out of the country.

US$406 billion compares, for example, to the UK's public sector borrowing of £120 billion. Remitting individuals rarely bring capital in with them, and yet they are entitled to access to public services, and their ability to earn at all is predicated on the existence of a public infrastructure to which they have made no contribution.

It is grossly unfair to resident taxpayers whose money stays in the country (often to be taxed over and over again) if remitting individuals are permitted to send money away without adequate checks that they have made their obligatory contribution to the public services and infrastructure of the country in which the remittance has been earned.

Solution: the EU should introduce exchange control for payments that are leg-out, whilst abolishing central bank reporting for all leg-in ones. A remitting individual should produce an employer's payslip at the bank to show they have had the statutory deductions made.

Could this be a re-run of the HUBSYS j-v for payments, launched with PwC in Docklands (2000-01)? Cost £70 million; benefits zero. PwC ordered HP kit because they weren't the auditor of HP and could get a re-seller fee, and then found that they could only have Temenos or an app built in Tunisia running on HP, RS6000, Tandem or Solaris being the platforms for all known payment apps at the time (ACI, Fundtech, Software Integrators..). No problem -Temenos does accounting and we'll just build the payments bit (errr hold on, isn't HUBSYS meant to be specialising in payments processing?). And just one more thing we forgot: HUBSYS is a non-bank and has to charge VAT on its processing fees to SocGen, which cannot offset it. OK, let's shut down then.

Thanks Gary and Fiona: what would you recommend to organisations that have built their offerings around SWIFT MT and have reached the terminus of the potential of those messages, for whom SWIFT MX does not seem to offer much more, but whose members are, as you say, anchored in technology that can only deal with MT (or MX translated back into MT), but whose thinking may not be legacy?

Hi Gary - how would you view ISO20022 in that case? SWIFT are the registrar and proposer, all the ISO messages are SWIFT MX messages, SWIFT does the annual release, but you can use ISO messages without sending them over SWIFT, the reciprocal of using FileAct without the contents having to be MT or MX. The ISO messages are getting a lock over European payments thanks to their being afforded a de facto monopoly under the SEPA Migration End Date Regulation... ???

How does David Cameron know it will be low-cost? In fact what does he know about the subject at all? (Probably enough to be Governor of the Bank of England, judging by who else is on PaddyPower's list).

These schemes rely on banks pricing the loan to the "little firm" at the "big firm" rate whilst not plotting the Contingent Liability as Guarantor credit exposure onto the "big firm": otherwise it blocks the "big firm's" lines.

And what does an invoice approval signify? It doesn't mean the "big firm" has the money to pay, and nor does it convert the invoice into a liquidated debt: it remains unliquidated and subject to the lengthy process to get a County Court Order, winding-up petition etc..

This looks like another still-born industry initiative. I'm hearing Orbian, ePayments+, EBA STEP3 and other skeletons rattling in the cupboard. On the other hand it would work if the debt was evidenced on a Bill of Exchange which in turn could be re-discounted at the Bank of England - oh no sorry we scrapped that scheme - the Eligible Bill Discount Facility. So this must be more a re-spray of eLeanor coming out just in time for SIBOS (no sorry that's called BPO, isn't it?)

Are "social costs" different from "costs"? If not, this finding undermines the business case for SEPA. The original SEPA objective was to lower the cost of payments in the EU from its supposedly-current level of 3% of EU GDP to 1%, the 1% figure being considered world class. If the cost is now less than 1%, then the goal has been over-achieved without SEPA and SEPA can be abandoned. Result! Job done!

Isn't 'green light' a bit strong? This is not a formal 'negative clearance' as could be obtained in the 1990s. All it means is that the EC decided not to further pursue any lines of enquiry connected with the proposition that has been put on the table. They are at liberty to take it up again if the implemented version is different from the blueprint version. As well, anyone can file suit in a Member State court-of-law if they think Project Oscar is behaving in an anti-competitive manner in future.

"A committee is an animal with four back legs" (attributed to Lenin). I am sure the Minutes of this particular committee will be copious and open for public inspection so as to assuage any possible Competition Law concerns caused by having all market participants in the room - except the consumer.