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This piece predicates its messages on the price action of Bitcoin, which misses the point. From a payments perspective an analysis of transaction volumes, values, network growth, users and uses is needed to get insights into how Bitcoin is faring. It’s a complex subject as the onchain txns are only part of the story whereas many more txns are conducted over the Lightning network for example. Obviously, a lot of txns are generated in speculation and investment in Bitcoin, but it is the remaining txns that are of most interest. It would be great to have a balanced analysis from a true payments perspective, that separates payment uses from trading. Has anyone done this?

Cross-border is a good use case for wholesale CBDC, great to see CBs exploring it.

However, discovering that payments can be settled atomically in under 15 seconds is hardly ground-breaking.

Such trials should be exploring the operational implications and requirements of enabling 24/7 just-in-time cross-border liquidity provisioning to support 24/7 real-time payments for both bank and non-bank services; and critically how to provide such services at the scale required by cross-border trade and how existing services can transition to this paradigm.

clearly the Canadian banks are in no hurry for real-time payments otherwise they would be pushing hard for this project to be delivered. The opposite seems to be the case, I wonder why?

oh dear, could this be a Ratner moment? (google Ratner gaffe for a chuckle)

It is improbable this is a mistake, looks like a test. Something odd is going on. For example, PayPal closed the account of the Free Speech Union several weeks ago which the article fails to mention.

Weaponising financial services is unwelcome. Makes the case to ban CBDCs which can only worsen this trend.

Mckinsey's annual global payments report is always a good read but I find it hard to believe this headline figure of $2.1 trillion revenue. Global GDP is about $85trn, so payments industry revenue on this estimate is 2.5% of global GDP which seems very high.

Even if the figure is accurate, surely the payments industry is on the wrong track if this figure is expected to rise  40%+ in five years to $3trn. It would increase the payments industry revenue to over 3% of global GDP.

Payments is a cost of doing business, for selling and transacting - it's a friction and I would expect with innovation and technology this cost should be reduced and competed much lower for the benefit of everyone. Instead, an increase suggests a rent-seeking industry becoming more adept at building moats and erecting barriers.

My bet and passion is for next generation payments infrastructures to emerge with a step reduction in compute costs and a step up in capability. There is  plenty of opportunity to run these infrastructures and services over them profitability with the right business models.

The next five years in payments is going to be very different to the past - and it is going to be fun.

This is very encouraging, the Lloyds solution looks sound - in effect, it allows commercial banks to tokenise their deposits giving them the ability to exploit programmable money using smart contracts for the benefit of their customers with innovative services and products - while retaining their ability to clear payments between banks, accept deposits and make loans, all core to commercial banking.

It is a much better and more practical solution than a retail CBDC issued by a central bank which would open up a Pandora's box of risks and complications with no clear benefits to the financial system or to society. 

global GDP is about $85trn so a $20trn revenue figure for the payments industry is implausible.

The $2.5trn from McKinsey also looks too high for revenue, although probably includes interest on funds.

Even so, whatever the true figure, it is big which is why payments attract so many new entrants and innovators from outside banking. However, it is also represents a friction which I would expect to reduce through competition and innovation - with continual change in the payments industry for years to come.

It was hardly a battle - Paym was implemented in different ways with different names by different banks, typically buried unexplained in a mobile bank app, never marketed properly with no industry strategy.

A single name and app, with a few tweaks such as auto-registration, with a proper go-to-market strategy, roadmap and marketing campaign would have done the trick - as it has with enormous success in Sweden (Swish), Norway (Vipps), Denmark (Mobile Pay), Poland (Blik), USA (Venmo), India (Paytm) to name a few. Unfortunately, the UK banks never showed an interest collectively or individually to make Paym a success despite the widespread evidence of mobile payment adoption elsewhere.

Today, UK consumers still need to know and key in/retain a contact's bank details in their mobile bank app to pay them (unless they use Paym of course) instead of simply tapping a phone contact, as has been doable in many other countries for years.

If Paym was offered as an open API, I am sure Fintechs and other innovators would transform its use - still time to do so?

This measure fails to get to the root of the problem which is banks struggling to detect the accounts fraudsters use to collect fraud and divert funds and then failing to block onward transmission of the funds. It's baffling why so little is said or done about this and whether some banks are worse than others at managing it (which fraud stats suggest is the case).

Reimbursement for victims is necessary and a good optic to show action is being taken but it will have no direct impact on fraudsters - it might even lead to APP reimbursement fraud.

A big dent could be made in APP fraud by requiring the beneficiary bank to check the beneficiary name on the incoming payment matches the name on the beneficiary account.

This check is missing in bank systems because historically Sort Code and bank number have been the identifier used since electronic payments started with BACS.

This check is a very simple one to make for banks, but presumably it remains unimplemented to avoid unmanageable numbers of rejected/suspended payments due to minor diferences in the sent name and correct name. However, if CoP is implemented by all banks for all types of accounts and without an option for the sender to override discrepancies flagged by CoP, then it would shut down a significant amount of APP fraud.