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Actually, pandemic may not be an excuse but the raison d'être for QR code in UK.

Earlier today, I'd tweeted as follows:

In China, India, etc., Merchant has no POS, often can't accept Credit Card. AliPay, PayTM offer Merchant a way to accept digital payments via QR code, with Customer's Smartphone being QR Code Reader. In USA, UK, Merchant already has POS, either directly from Acquirer or via SQUARE et al, has been able to accept Credit Card for ages, ergo has no compelling reason to change to QR to accept Credit Card / Bank A/c linked payments, regardless of low cost of QR. I've long argued that SBUX Pay has succeeded in USA because it's really a Loyalty App with Wallet Payment bundled as a necessary step at the end, rather than a pure-play payment method. I believe WalMart Pay, Dunkin Donuts Pay et al in USA also work on QR Code (with Customer's Smartphone acting as QR Code Reader).

After reading this article, it struck me that, by providing contactless operations, QR enjoys strong "Product Zeitgeist Fit" during pandemic, which could be the compelling reason to switch to it from ("contactful") POS, in USA, UK and other countries where POS penetration is high. (I'm assuming these countries still have some old gen non-contactless POS terminals)

There's no doubt that customers will be less keen on visiting bank branches under the new normal. I'm also reasonably sure that banks will be able to improve the CX / UX of digital banking to enable - more like persuade, actually - customers to fulfill more of their bank account servicing needs without visiting bank branches. 

However, Sales is the big elephant in the room. Reality is, many products sold by bankers in the branch are "sold, not bought" e.g. Insurance, Funds, Stock Trading accounts. While online sales of these products has been supported for 10-20 years, the online channel has still not gone mainstream. It's also not as though customers have to buy these products. Therefore, I doubt if banks can compensate the loss of branch sales via digital channels for these products.

I see banks opening "secure branch areas" with physical distancing to sell these products.

Then there's also the factor to be kept in mind of bankers themselves leaving their highrise buildings and moving to branches. Covid-19: Barclays CEO signals end of the skyscraper and rebirth of the branch.

Kudos to NAB. I expect this to be a win-win initiative. At least going by the situation in India. The term used in India is "Moratorium" instead of the more-easily understandable "Repayment Pause" in Australia. Many Indian borrowers have conveniently assumed moratorium means waiver and are in for a huge surprise when the moratorium ends and their EMIs may increase because interest will accrue during the 3 months moratorium period. Bank websites have clearly mentioned most of this but having a few live humans to explain the situation will definitely help both parties: Banks to ease their cash flow. Borrowers so that they don't end up being in debt longer than they need to. 

"R2P requests involve a request for payment sent by the payee...".

Ergo initiated by Payee. Ergo PULL. Need for approval by Payor does not change that.

If Payor were to initiate the transaction after receving the e-invoice from the Merchant, the feature would be called, simply, PAY. Payor is not making any request, so question of REQUEST2PAY doesn't arise.

I can see there are merits of using a BaaS instead of self-hosted blockchain but I'm not seeing any compelling SME use cases for blockchain (versus centralized architecture) in the first place.

Can you list a few, especially in the light of issues highlighted by me in  

Blockchain - Calling BS On Decentralization And Resilience

1600 fintech companies, survey conducted of 59 of them. It's a well known fact that only 10-20% of aspiring startups manage to get funding. Therefore, this population is not at all homogeneous and this sample does not fulfill the Gallup Soup Principle outlined in Demystifying The Ubiquitous Sample Size Of 2000.

Ergo I find it hard to accept that such a small sample size will yield statistically significant results in this case.

"Request to Pay" - or PULL mode - solves a somewhat outlier use case but creates a massive fraud vulnerability in an Account to Acount Real Time Payment that's irrevocable and provides zero fraud protection. R2P feature is the single biggest source of fraud in UPI, India's A2A RTP. 

I've been saying, half jokingly, that the regulator should use the pandemic as the fall guy to pull the plug on SCA, which kills conversion and boosts blood pressure but I'm dead serious in advocating that course of action for R2P. The risk-return of R2P makes absolutely no sense and I expect R2P fraud to be many times that of APP fraud in UK. 

Sorry but I've been reading puff pieces like this for years and legacy banks have only become bigger and stronger during this period. The pandemic is only likely to reinforce this trend by triggering the flight to safety of capital to megabanks.

Thinking big and reaching for the stars and all that are quite fine but it can't be done with the budget of a bullock cart. Question is, does Amazon have the budget of a rocket i.e. enough cashflow to do big time lending as Credit Card Issuer? I think not. But I'm open to be corrected.

There is no cost to deferred payment by credit card if you pay your full balance by the end of the month. I've been using credit cards for +30 years and have not paid a penny by way of interest. Credit Card also offers rewards, fraud protection and other benefits not offered by A2A payments.

I remember somebody questioning the future of credit card in UK on these very pages of Finextra almost 5-7 years ago. I don't have the latest figures but I'm sure credit card volumes in UK are still higher than A2A volumes.

The thing is credit card is incumbent. It doesn't need to have any need. Inertia and change resistance work to its advantage. These same things work to the disadvantage of A2A payment methods.