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It's clear that payments depend on a few providers.

Managing that risk in the UK is the key challenge to PSR, FCA, Bank of England and Pay.UK.

The €108trillion figure is cashless not contactless (easy slip). €108tn relates to a UK GDP of about €2.5tn. Put it in context, that's €18m of payments per inhabitant of the UK. That's still quite a lot.

I think the mastercard acquisition of Vocalink was very timely and focussed. The Earthport acquisition may be as well, but it relies on  control of remote accounts for the most part and I'm therefore not clear these are rails, more bogeys. In any case, schemes should spend money while they have it, anticipating that the golden years are coming to an end for the cards market.

We should, of course, keep an eye on concentration of risk in a few providers. After the Visa outage last year,it's clear s

Some good points on the PISP interface discussion, but don’t overlook the other end of the transaction. Remember that payments is a two-sided market and it may be that merchants will rewardconsumers (and commercial payers) out of the transaction cost savings. With good fraud prevention, which we expect PSD2 & CMA9 Open Banking to deliver, fraud provision will be small, but other disputes must be handled well-enough if not using card/credit protection. Don’t assume that consumer benefits aren’t there because they’re not being provided by their PSP, and don’t forget that merchants need benefits too.