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The blockchain is rapidly ascending the slope of inflated expectations. Distributed ledger and decentralised consensus technology will certainly enable whole new classes of application and ways of doing business, but there are currently some significant gaps between technology and the real world. If ledger entries represent real world objects, and the ledger show a transfer of ownership, who is going to enforce it if one party reneges, and under what contractual/legal framework? How will smart contracts, implemented in code rather than legalese, cope with inconvenient real-world events such as the death of one of the contracting parties? We need to allow time for the wheat to get sorted from the chaff, and for sensible business models to emerge from the current ferment. At that point I expect sets of rules to emerge that look rather similar to current payment scheme rules, supported by traditional contractual frameworks and enforced by good old fashioned centralised authorities. Until then, caveat emptor ...

Fair comment, and I stand corrected for my sloppy geographical generalisation!

Given the EU regulatory interchange cap of 0.3 per cent for credit cards, and the lower of  7 euro-cents or about 0.2 per cent for debit card rates, I can't see Quisk's 'digital cash' proposition making sense this side of the Atlantic, even though PSD2 will allow merchant steering.

I wish Zapp all the best, and I know it's a killer proposition for m-commerce, but in terms of user experience in-store I don't believe it will be any better than NFC or HCE solutions, let alone cards. Perhaps I will be pleasantly surprised when it launches!

The introduction of ApplePay and HCE certainly remove some of the technology barriers to mobile payments, but mobile NFC does not yet meet Marc Andreessen's criterion for success: it must be 10 times better/ cheaper/ faster than what's on the market today. Uber remains one of the few applications to have cleared that hurdle by embedding the payment into the overall consumer transaction, but in-store mobile purchases at POS still have a long way to go. It's still way more convenient to use your card.

Hi Ketharaman: I suggest you have a look at the Zapp video, it shows that there isn't a problem knowing which merchant the request came from, and no drop-down lists involved.

Ketharaman, the exact mechanism is Zapp's trade secret, but card networks have addressed the same problem (is this transaction from a genuine merchant?) and Zapp can use a similar cryptographic veririfcation approach.

Alexander, I think Paym is adequate for a rather limited range of P2P use cases. For C2B payments an initial "request to pay" from the payee is essential for usability - a pure push model where the payer has to laboriously key in payment details, with a high probability of error, is not the seamless experience that people expect nowadays. 

The technical challenges of a federated immediate payments network will be interesting. SEPA has shown us how there can be many different interpretations of a single standard, so ensuring interoperability between switches will be a priority. Reconciling different settlement cycles on different switches will need consideration, as will synchronisation of reference data. Ensuring low latency is difficult even with a single switch in a small country, and will be more difficult across transcontinental distances and multiple switches.

Despite the technical challenges it is undoubtedly achievable, as the card networks have shown. The bigger challenge is likely to be aligning the commercial and political stakeholders to drive the project forward. Regulatory pressure was sufficient to mobilise projects in the UK and Singapore, but American distrust of government and regulation makes such an approach less likely to succed there. The ability to capitalise on the new business opportunities of the digital age is what will really motivate organizations to get on board. 

I wonder how the Access to Accounts (XS2A) requirement will affect the concept of "bank account at the centre of the payments relationship"? If banks fund the construction of a real-time infrastructure, and third parties then free-ride on it, that doesn't seem very equitable. Unless the XS2A legislation is drafted carefully, it could prove a disincentive for construction of real-time infrastructures, which ironically would hinder the innovation that XS2A is meant to promote.