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In Fintech Shouldn’t Stop Chanting The Disruption Mantra, I highlighted why it's naive to expect fintechs like challenger banks to improve CX. Ditto for solutions because it takes two to tango.

Challenger Bank can do nothing by itself if Sender Bank and / or Scheme truncates the Bene Name (per my experience in UK) or strips it out altogether (as it happens with IMPS in India) because of limitations in bank system's field length or scheme's ISO8587 messaging standard. 

Collaboration is mandatory. 

It is impressive how I can copy-paste a few lines of code into my website and start accepting digital payments in a few minutes. However, it's depressing how the PSP (e.g. PayPal) puts a hold on my account after it has received money and when I want to withdraw it to my bank account and then asks me all the questions that banks ask before approving my merchant account. IME, when it comes to business payments, you face friction either before onboarding or after onboarding - a truly frictionless payments system is yet to be invented. And that includes blockchain payment systems. 

There's no compelling reason for the recipient bank to stop payments going to the wrong account. In fact, the way things are, there's nothing like "wrong account". Sender Banks make it clear that beneficiary name is not considered anywhere. So payment will go to stated account as long as the stated account exists in the recipient bank's CIF. That's why we're where we are and a CoP service is required in the first place.  

Regulators had full access to transactions on exchanges, still could not prevent "front running" and other shady practices of algo trading in realtime. Why? Going by Michael Lewis's "Flash Boys", that was because algo trading operates in millisecond whereas regulators monitor transactions only once a second. So algo traders would get away by squaring off a transaction within a second, thus staying out of the radar of the regulator. Shows that mere access to data won't achieve much. I suspect the same in the context of Blockchain as well. 

ShopIn already pays SHOPcoin for shopping data. Now we hear that Jaguar Land Rover will soon pay IOTAcoin for driving data. Which will be first company to pay "OBCoin" for banking data, per my guidance in Open Banking Needs A Blockchain Boost? 

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.