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Perhaps the 'True Cause' of Bitcoin's resurgence is a [probably] sensible reaction to the global response to COVID.  People are concerned that the actions being taken by governments to 'print money and allow thousands of businesses to fail,  will result in the wholesale devaluation of shares and currencies?

I worked at Barclays during the time when Pingit was launched and up to and beyond the point when Open Banking was introduced.  These opinions are personal and are not necessarily representative of the Barclays position or motivations.

Pingit effected bank to bank transfers using a mobile phone number as a proxy for a sort code and bank account number.  Underpinniing this 'feature' was a bank to bank transfer via Vocalink's Faster Payments network.

This is the same process Open Banking payments follow today.  Like all payment services / instruments in order to work commercially they need critical mass of both buyers and sellers [points of acceptance]. 

My guess would be that Barclays could justify this decision for several reasons:  its mobile banking platform and Bpay provide similar functionality,  the proliferation of Open Banking services and the scope of companies driving adoption [distributes the cost of creating acceptance], or maybe the possible lack of differentiation.

The future?

Open Banking and Open Finance in combination with the capabilities of the crypto building blocks [in particular verifable credentials] will, in my opinion, introduce a new level of efficiencies for payment networks or Bank to Bank transfers.

In fact I'd like to predict that one day people will say, of Open Banking, its key contribution was to 'simplify the payments value chain'.  Enabling banks to do what they did hundreds of years ago: put people in control of asserting something they own or have proven.  Issue  'transferable bearer instruments' enabling instant atomic transactions [all aspects of the ledger are updated instantly or nothing happens at all]  without the need for third party intervention/involvement.

Yes, this is how crypto currencies work today:  and my suggestion describes a fiat pegged transfer,  using modifications to the protocols to manage permissions and ownership and the maintenance of systems of record [perhaps the biggest cost saving for Banks].

Ooops, I have broken my rule to not use the conditional subjuntive [could have, should have would have]...

I also agree with Andrew Smith when he suggests that to meet the goals of Open Finance, we need to 'kill off the concept of direct APIs.'

For hundreds of years one of the pillars of trust between a bank and its clients has been/continues to be that only the bank and its clients can see the transaction history.  An Open Banking data API threatens to break this trust. It places a huge burdeen of responsibility on the business acting as data controller for such sensitive data, and requires a leap of faith for the consumer.

To solve this problem at Ecospend, we have built a mechanism for individuals to assert anything which can be evidenced from a Bank Statement, without revelaing any personally identifiable information.  In technical terms this is a zero Knowledge Proof based self sovereign data assertion and verification service.  

It obviates the need for APIs for the business and mitigates most of the GDPR obligations for the relying party [business].

Whereas this is still early days, we are ready to participate in trials with Banks or Large corporations who would like to run some tests.

...by the end of 2017.?' Might there not be alternative means of maintaining systems of record and/or counter party ledgers by this time?

Big on scope light in details but given the assembled investors and board must be one to watch.