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Last I checked, which was in Aug. 2023, UK FPS had an annual run rate of $4.74T and it was #1 in the world in A2A RTP TPV. IMO that metric is way more relevant than #9 rank on Per Capita basis, which anyway can't be lower than Brazil or India, which are ranked #2 and #3 on TPV and have way higher populations than UK. 

"Canada's Real-Time Rail, a payments system that has been in development for several years and was originally set to go live this month, has been delayed again as the body that runs Canada's domestic payments networks pauses to perform a second review of the project's risks.", wrote Kate Fitzgerald on 26 Jun 2023 in an American Banker article (Disclosure: I'm quoted in this article).

No skin off my back since I'm not a taxpayer in Canada but a further delay of (at least) two years is ridiculous. It's not like RTR is something new - it's just another A2A RTP that has been implemented by 60 other countries in the last 15+ years starting from FPS in UK in 2008.

I'm guessing the latest delay is due to the third - or fourth or fifth? - review of the program's risk, just as the previous ones were. My unsolicited $0.02: If Canada does a Lloyds Bank style purge of its risk department
headcount, RTR might go live before end of 2025, if not 2024.

Since the dawn of online commerce in the mid-1990s, if not earlier, ecommerce commerce have always integrated credit card, eCheque, cash on delivery, and other payment modes into their websites and workflows. IMO the addition of BNPL now is nothing new and does not qualify as Embedded Finance.  

Not that banks ever claimed to provide end-to-end financial experiences but they at least sold a plethora of products that customers could pick and choose to achieve their financial goals. Fintechs came into existence to unbundle various products and thereby create disjointed financial experiences. They have flopped in their endeavor to thus inflict "death by thousand cuts" to banks. Their failure has only validated the traditional business model of banks to stick with products instead of getting into experiences.  

Furthermore, as Matt Levine highlighted on the back of the collapse of SVB and other regional banks in USA last year, "a bank with sleepy depositors would do well, a bank with antsy depositors would go bust". Two years after the end of ZIRP and rise of interest rates to 4-5%, the #1 bank in USA still offers only 0.01% interest. Therefore, I don't see banks ever promoting their customers' financial literacy. Given how various banking charges allegedly affect the financial health of their customers adversely, the best we can expect from banks is that they don't promote financial ILLITERACY. 

Kudos to Lloyds Bank. If rogue regulators apply drunk under lamp post regulation and force banks to compensate victims of APP scam for no fault of banks, it's only natural that banks warn consumers that they risk getting scammed at various marketplaces / aggregators and, in the extreme case, even stop payments to such merchants. Anybody who thinks banks are spreading FUD, instead of creating awareness, should take over the liability of making refunds for APP scam from banks.

Kudos to Lloyds Bank. I don't recall any other bank anywhere in the world taking such a public and explicit stance on what has always been well known in business: Mitigating risk does not pay the bills.

Screening for risk is okay in loan approval, credit card authorization, and other transactional areas but too much risk sensitivity blocks strategic transformation. Most often, risk professionals lack the competence to analyze risk in the TO-BE transformed state in a rigorous manner, so they lean towards blocking the transformation as CYA strategy.

Too much risk sensitivity is one big reason why banks have lagged fintechs in product and UX. I'm not saying banks should mimic fintechs' products and UX but, if that's what they want to do, downsizing risk department headcount is the way to go.

As soon as Russia invaded Ukraine, I recall reading that Google canceled Google Pay in Russia, thus leaving many Moscow Metro commuters stranded without a key payment method. Going by that, I'd assumed that the US sanctions announced immediately after the invasion covered not only SWIFT but also Russian (and American) apps on Apple AppStore and Google Play Store. Ergo, I'm surprised that this took so long. 

With all their whining and ranting, merchants have managed to pull wool over the eyes of J6P Consumer, who thinks that merchants are underdogs, and completely misses that, when he pays with debit card or A2A, merchants incur way lower MDR cost but rarely pass it on to him by way of a discount on the sticker price.

Whenever a merchant threatens to surcharge me for paying with credit card, I dump everything at checkout, and scoot - not to another method of payment without surcharge but to another merchant who accepts credit card without surcharge. In 35 years of using credit card as my go-to MOP in many countries, 99% of merchants have called me back and waived their demand for surcharge, and I've easily found another merchant for the remaining 1% of the cases.

Last I checked, Cardlytics claimed that 2000 banks and financial institutions used its platform to make targeted offers to their customers off of their spend data. That didn't stop finsurgents from claiming that Financial Institutions Are Missing Out on Personalisation. Hopefully, the entry of the largest bank in USA will stop them stop them from making such claims going forward.

Why would a consumer with above room temperature IQ switch to FPS / A2A RTP and forfeit rewards, deferred payment and other benefits offered by credit card?

Most of your consumer-side benefits of A2A are contrived e.g. (1) Tap and Go of Contactless Credit Card is way more frictionless and faster than entering password to open screenlock, start A2A app, scan QR, enter PIN, etc. (2) Consumers swipe / dip / tap a credit card instore - they don't enter card details instore. Your  statement "bypassing the need to enter card details" is completely wrong for instore payments. Now, ignoring for the moment that the title of your post says "instore" and taking online payments: Through a combination of Visa Direct, Card on File Tokenization, etc., I have not entered my full credit card details for a vast majority of online credit card payments in over three years, so your statement is wrong for most online payments as well.  

I could go on and on but Pay By Bank payment methods have continued to flop in advanced markets because its PSPs have never answered the question "What's in it for consumers" satisfactorily. Answers like yours only insult their intelligence and further estrange them from A2A RTP. 

BCG calls it Loyalty 2.0. Four years ago, McKinsey called it "Platformication" and advised banks to sell e.g. Flowers. When rideshare, ecommerce and other industries sell BNPL and other financial services products, it's called Embedded Finance. In that spirit, I called this Embedded Shopping when I first came across this three years ago.

Notwithstanding the terminology, I believe banks have been doing this business for long enough time and I wonder if they can garner any incremental revenue from it to offset the drop in the interchange revenue arising out of the latest Visa / MasterCard settlement with merchants. 

IMO, I think the low hanging fruit for banks could be pureplay BNPL, which has way higher MDR than Credit Card. Thus far, the BNPL play of JPMCs and BofAs and Citis has comprised retrofitting installment-based repayments to a normal credit card payment with normal credit card MDR. As a result of this new settlement, they might want to introduce pureplay BNPL products à la Affirm, Klarna, PayPal, fetching higher MDR, as a new source of revenue.