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Mastercard has a market cap of $431bn with 33,400 employees.

Accenture, just voted the world's best management consultancy in a global Forbes survey, has a market cap of $206bn and 733,000 employees.

Such is the power of technology and transaction businesses in generating value.

The OBL website shows (for June 2024) 6.1m payments users and 5.17m account information users, presumably about 1m users use both.

These figures respectively were 2.15m and 4.2m users in June last year, so payments is the main driver of OB user growth.

While the 10m user milestone is a great one to highlight, what really matters is usage. Payment txns are increasing each month, but the payments per user has been stuck for over two years at 2 - 3 per month. For account information, no usage stats are published other than API calls, perhaps a metric such as data megabytes/month would be useful?

However, although open banking is supposed to be about data, the growth story shows it is more about payments than data and that increasing the payments per user through increasing business acceptance of OB payments is the main challenge for OBL.

Roll-on the day when we get paid daily instead of monthly or twice a month - the technology is available now, to initiate the payments, manage the payroll and manage the extra transactions in bank accounts.

It is also unsustainable to treat pay for work already done as a loan just because payment is made in advance of the normal pay day.

This looks like sensible risk management - paying BNPL with a credit card is equivalent to paying a credit card balance with another credit card, which no issuer would allow.

Remarkable results - the annual report shows 590m monthly transactions as of Dec 23, up 73% on the previous year.

This is a true indicator that Revolut is loved by its customers - "every transaction is a customer interaction".

For external APIs, stability is critical - technically and commercially. When companies build software embedding third-party APIs, any changes to an API can cause havoc with their software and the product/service using it.

Often, it is better for your customers to build an additional API than change an existing one.

It is inevitable that central banks will shift their focus to wholesale CBDCs - there are some genuine benefits and innovations in replacing/complementing RTGSs for transacting in reserves.

Unlike retail CBDCs where central banks have no expertise in retail payments and face huge public resistance on privacy and censorship concerns that look impossible to address.

However, stablecoins are likely to be hugely beneficial drivers of innovation in retail and commercial payments. Although stablecoins use secure blockchains, in reality they are very different to crypto, as they are simply tokenised fiat currency and can be used as a means of exchange just like paper or electronic fiat currency.

The BIS is a fan of asset tokenisation (https://www.bis.org/speeches/sp240209.htm) although seems to suggest that price fluctuations in stablecoins rule them out as a suitable way to tokenise fiat currency. However, e-money is a form of tokenised fiat currency and has been in successful widespread use for decades - designed properly, stablecoins have huge potential.

It is also a misconception that stablecoins are rarely used for payments. It is true their genesis and major use is in the trading of non-fiat cryptocurrencies on crypto-exchanges, but their use in payments is growing and this will continue in leaps and bounds. Checkout Circle's website for examples https://www.circle.com/en/case-studies.

Better still, try it for yourself - sending a dollar payment cross-border using, say USDC is a delight compared to using the banking system. Almost immediate settlement, low fees and a FX rate at the wholesale rate (very little, if any spread).

I expect this also could be used for dynamic pricing during the day, including surge pricing, to vary prices with demand and clear expiring items, to maximise revenue and profit.

So the digital pound will have no effect on how we buy at POS - same process, same customer experience just a different source of funds.

Nothing new, nothing different, no innovation - what's the point of it?

In Asia, millions of micromerchants have adopted mobile payments in multipe countries which give them immediate finality of funds. Previously, they had neither the resources or need/demand to accept payments through card POS systems, just cash.

That is innovation - sorely missing in the UK payments industry and the institutions that control it.   

this initiative makes a lot of sense - look at the impact when NPCI in India added UPI, a bank agnostic solution for payment initiation on top of various domestic payment systems. A similar configuration should work well for cross-border