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When I pay with credit card at a supermarket till - as I've been doing ever since I got my first credit card in the late 1980s - I get rewards, deferred payment, fraud protection and a myriad of other benefits.

Why would I pay with an A2A RTP like Zelle / FPS / UPI and forfeit all those benefits?

We've been hearing about Alternative Payments for 15 years. Merchants have always preferred them over credit card. Still they have failed to go mainstream. I suspect that's because they've failed to answer the above question about "what's in it for the consumer?" Unless they do that now, I doubt if they'll succeed in future either. 

Maybe UK Finance doesn't want egg on its face with over-optimistic projections? 

Just one bank sized its FPS infra in 2007-8 for a projected Year 3 load of 2400TPS ~ 76B transactions per year.

Against that, the entire industry has hit 3.6B TPY in Year 14, which is less than 5% of that single bank's projection for Year 3. 

Can't  blame UK Finance for not being more aggressive in its projections of FPS volumes.

"FCA has brought action against 4,226 BNPL firms this year."

OMG.

I never imagined that there'd be this many BNPL firms even all over the world, let alone in just FCA's jurisdiction of UK.

Because regulator may not let them leverage such opportunities?

I don't know about Brazil but many major regs in payments space in India in the last 2-3 years - e.g. Positive Pay, Emandate, CoFT - have added friction to cheque and credit card payments and intentionally or unintentionally diverted cheque and credit card volumes to UPI.

Was a time when PFM and Payments Fintechs, running off of bank accounts and credit card rails, would posture to disrupt banks - an obviously ridiculous posturing. 

I'm guessing this central banker is imitating those  Fintechs.

Also, going by India, A2A  rail is domestic, credit card rail is largely owned by foreign entities, so I won't rule out a bit of nationalism in the "A2A will kill Credit Card" posturing.

tl;dr. I stopped reading at "Blockchain smart contracts ... no middlemen delaying or taking a portion of this payment."

How?

Haven't you heard of Gas Fees for execution of Smart Contracts? When I last checked, if you want your money without any delay - aka in realtime - gas fee was way higher than 2% MDR of Credit Card. 

Then there's the dApp that provides the said service. I refuse to believe that the owner of the dApp will charge nothing for its service. When I last checked, the largest NFT marketplace OpenSea took 2.5% of the transaction value as its fees.

If anything, Blockchain increases the number of middlemen and amount of fees.

Not surprisingly, I've heard of many blockchain-based music platforms during the last 2-3 years but none of them has gone mainstream.

At the peak of re/demonetization, a govt honcho predicted that credit card and POS will be dead in India in 3 years.

5 years later, the count of credit cards and POS terminals has shot up by three times - despite India's A2A RTP UPI becoming a blockbuster hit during the same period.

This turned out to be one of the most harebrained predictions of all times!

To democratize credit, UPI operator NPCI recently announced that UPI will soon support credit card as another funding source.

Nowadays, "Partial KYC" done by neobanks and fintechs does not even completely verify ID and Address but even "Full KYC" is not supposed to vet customer's character. ByTW, accounts opened for convicted criminals are KYCd. 

I agree with your analogy of driver-killer, just that the equivalent party in  the case a cybercrime is the Alleged Scammer, not Payee Bank, TELCO, et al.

It's not you being simple but that the term KYC is quite obfuscatory.

I'm covering liability in a follow on post but here's a spoiler: (1) KYC is not a character certificate (2) If banks can open accounts even for convicted criminals, how can they decline alleged scammers? (3) The scam involves not just Payee Bank but TELCO, mobile handset manufacturer, utility company with which the phone is charged, et al. If the other parties don't have any liability, neither should the Payee Bank. 

$2.7M fine. LOL.

Yet another case of regulators puffing up their chests and bragging about doing all kinds of things when all they have done is slap a fine that's so puny that it's a rounding error on the valuation of the fined party. 

Reminds me of the concluding line of a FORTUNE magazine article about the $200M fine levied on food giant Archer-Daniels-Midland 20+ years ago: "Not only does crime pay, it’s just the cost of doing business."