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"consumer feedback seems to point towards a general satisfaction with payment services, which suggests the absence of a market failure in the sector."

This is certainly not the case in the UK where 80% of the billowing authorised push payment fraud originates in Big Tech apps.

Big Tech wants unfettered access to granular consumer payment data to combine with its other sources of data, posing a major risk to consumer privacy and freedoms.

This is clearly an area where Big Tech needs to be reined in.

I regularly use USDC to send USD payments across border to pay suppliers. I get spot rate, instant settlement and low fees - far superior to anything a bank can offer. The only issue is my bank recently is making it very difficult to send GBP to an exchange to buy USDC. This seems to be the case with other banks too - I sense the FCA must be behind this (so much for the government's pleadge to make the UK a leader in crypto/Fintech).

Banks typically lump stablecoins with crypto and talk about the 'investment' risks. They seem oblivious to the merits of stablecoins as a payment mechanism - if I were them I would follow PayPal's lead and offer USD stablecoins as a payment service and expand to EUR, GBP and other major currencies. First movers will clean up.

This is absurd - meaningless, unverifiable and unactionable. The world has lost its way when institutions of state commission and publish such banal work as if though it is useful analysis. What next - how about the equivalent distance travelled by car (electric, diesel or gas?) for a person's carbon consumption in generating the total taxes they pay in the EU?

great initiative - vive l'EURCV!

The Federal Reserve was formed in late 1913. Prior to that in the USA during the 19th century, first there were multiple forms of state bank notes, then multiple different national bank notes using a common design before Federal Reserve notes became the national standard in 1913.

My point is that there is precedent for multiple forms of private money to be standardised over time through legislation.

I published a LinkedIn article today with my cofounder at pingNpay arguing that CBDCs are more likely to follow a route of standardising private digital money such as fiat stablecoins that work in the market rather than centrally planned policy-driven initiatives seeing much success.

There are precedents for this such as the USA in the 19th century where competing forms of private money were standardised nationally as Federal Reserve notes in 1913. With different forms of USD stablecoins – USDT, USDC, TUSD, BUSD, PYUSD etc it is possible hitsory might repeat itself in the USA and in the UK too if private GBP stableocins take-off.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7137192181659770880/

This looks like a very positive step forward in providing regulatory clarity for the UK private sector on the use of digital money and innovations with it, but the 'devil is in the detail' which no doubt will come out over the next few weeks as everyone analyses these papers.

There is a lot to chew on - the FCA's discussion paper is 110 pages, the BoE's looks almost as long and the CEO's letter is very dense - I expect CEO's, or at least their strategy teams will need to read it multiple times to understand the implications.

A key immediate observation is banks may issue tokenised deposits but are prevented from issuing stablecoins unless branded under a different entity - this is fair enough, but a pound is a pound and I expect branding stablecoins separately may cause confusion e.g. US stablecoins include USDT, USDC, TUSD, BUSD, PYUSD, USDP to name a few!  

this is an interesting product and I am sure we will see more tokenisation of real-world assets including company shares from financial institutions - but how is this different to a gold ETF? and how is a token holder guaranteed that the gold backing their token has no "double duty" as collateral for something else?  

Nat West share price down 11% today and 40% so far this year

Does the SEC really understand what AI is, its capabilities and impact? Like most pronouncements on AI this story lacks any concrete evidence and robust reasoning, just fear-mongering about what might  happen, which equally, given the lack of arguments presented, might never happen.