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On a side note, obviously-biased comments can provoke you to dig more deeply. That's what happened with me when I saw the following comment on LinkedIn:

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My suspicion is that this is another service which exposes how poorly some of the banks have stored this data and the issue is being able to successfully retrieve it in a format in which it can be validated against.

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I replied as follows:

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I don't think any bank could've survived this long by storing such basic data "poorly". IMO, the issue is proprietary format in which the data is stored, according to the core system used at each bank. While it's fit for purpose for a bank's internal use, it's not portable between multiple banks. So the real issue is for Bank A to hand over the account holder name to Bank B in an industry-standard format that's machine readable by Bank B's proprietary system in realtime while the customer is trying to initiate the payment. I won't blame banks for their inability to do this. I know a leading auto company that stores customer names so differently between its ERP, CRM, Service and Billing systems that it engaged my once-employer to carry out an MDM project to harmonize them. No way it could exchange name with another auto company, even in batch mode. And it won't need to because Auto companies don't need to share customer info with their competitors. Nor do companies in any other industry. Can Walmart ask Amazon to reveal name of Amazon customer? What banks are being asked to do under CoP - and Open Banking for that matter - is unparalelled in any other industry and for that, I'll cut banks some slack.

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I know this pov is not totally aligned with the one I'd expressed in my previous comment but I'm okay with letting the chips fall where they may...

@MichaelHarte: 

Nice to know that mine is not the only voice in the wilderness on this issue:)

My earlier comment was based on the assumption that CoP in UK would follow a P2P architecture i.e. it will entail direct communication between Sender Bank and Receiver Bank. Your reference to NIBSS switch in Nigeria tells me that there could be an alternative architecture in the form of hub-and-spoke. I'm not sure if UK CoP envisages P2P or H&S architecture.

I know bells and whistles can take time but I'd argue that the core functionality for CoP must be ready for a long time. Let's take the most rudimentary form of CoP: Barclays Customer enters Account # & Sort Code of Beneficiary in HSBC; Barclays CoP system pings HSBC's CoP system with these two pieces of data and asks for Accountholder Name. Ever since HSBC implemented a core system, which is probably decades ago, HSBC knows the answer to Barclays' question, and can give it to Barclays if it wished to; Barclays compares the name with the one entered by its Customer; either it matches or does not match.

So, the "perfect match" option of CoP should be ready to go already. Unless I'm missing something, I'm not sure what's holding up a rudimentary rollout of CoP for a year.

@FinextraMember + 1. 

During the last decade or two, the greatest buzz we've heard in retail payments in EU has been around EMV, Chip-and-PIN, Account Switching, Open Banking, PSD2, SCA, and so on. With so much focus on things that are arguably solutions looking for problems, core products - like EBA myBank - that could have possibly made some dent on the onslaught on EU markets by leaders from USA and China have understandably fallen by the wayside. 

My $0.02: EU regulators should carry out some serious soul-searching to find out why their repeated attempts to whip up local products have remained daydreams.

I notice a constant trend, not only with fintechs but even new-age giants like Amazon: Mostly everything works as advertised and in a highly frictionless manner, ergo good CX. However, if something fails, getting it fixed is quite hard, ergo bad Customer Service. With a Bank, even if it's hard to get something fixed, I trust that I will eventually succeed in that endeavor. Whereas, I don't have that trust with fintechs like PayTM, as I pointed out in PayTM Shows How Fintechs Can Lose Trust. Looks like it's the same with other fintechs.

From my personal experience of getting "cashback" from POS machines at supermarkets in UK, I'm sorry to say this is a very naive proposition and displays utter lack of appreciation of UX. I could walk in to an ATM and be out with my cash in 30 seconds. At a supermarket POS, I'd have to stand in a queue until I reached the POS, which took 10-30 minutes, depending on time of day and day of week. Not surprisingly, there were 3-4 ATMs installed inside the supermarket to fulfill the cash demand in a manner convenient to customers. The real solution to the high cost of installing and operating the ATM real estate is to drive greater adoption of cashless methods of payments - not shift the point of dispensing cash from ATM to POS. And that's what banks have been doing, with reasonable success, in the last 4-5 years. 

My experience with family and friends matches yours with your friends re. refund of wrongly directed payments. They somehow can't envisage that if everyone claimed every payment to be wrong and banks accepted their claim and refunded their money, the entire payment system would come to a grinding halt. I agree that education will help reduce cases of APP scams. But, many things in banking go on because of customer ignorance, so education might also drive people away from banking!!! According to a recent study, financially literate people eschew mutual funds, stocks and other investment products. Instead, they keep their money in Fixed Deposits, which is not what bankers really want.

Based on the existing desktop access, keen to know what revolutionary, innovative apps have been launched by fintechs so far to "transform and revitalise the user experience"?

IMO, driving awareness, innovation, compelling apps, and so on are too little, too late for Open Banking. MINT et al have attempted all these things for over a decade and have only achieved tepid offtake of their PFM / MoMMA apps. I strongly doubt if a mere change in the data access mechanism from scraping to API will lead to a sensational increase in the offtake of Open Banking apps.  

IMO, as I highlighted in Open Banking Needs A Blockchain Boost, the only way to bolster Open Banking is for TPPs to pay for customer's banking data and then do all the innovative things on top of it. 

Re. "The target for Open Banking access has fallen way short of legislators’ expectations, with over 40% of European banks still unable to provide adequate infrastructure and access."

Keen to know two things:

1. Expectations or regulatory mandate?
2. Has the regulator slapped any penalty on these 40% of European banks for defaulting?