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Bob Lyddon

Bob Lyddon Consultant at Lyddon Consulting Services

The Euro's battle for survival - entering the Red Zone

We have been analysing, for the thinktank the Bruges Group, the extreme difficulties in which the Eurozone finds itself, after years of economic stimulus totalling over 3% of GDP per annum and the build-up of both the ECB's Asset Purchase Programmes and the loans within the TARGET2 system. These imbalances are insoluble, and there is a big bullet ...

/wholesale SEPA and European Payments

Bob Lyddon

Bob Lyddon Consultant at Lyddon Consulting Services

Major difference between the UK's two flavours of Voluntary Liquidation and the FCA's SMR

Qualifying applicants under the UK Financial Conduct Authority's Senior Managers Regime must complete a lengthy form and, in certain circumstances, provide full explanatory information. A candidate must give full answers to all the questions and in such a way that the result is not "materially false, misleading or deceptive". Otherwise t...

/payments Banking Regulations

Bob Lyddon

Bob Lyddon Consultant at Lyddon Consulting Services

New Payment System Operator appoints two more natural legal persons as Member-Guarantors

I blogged two weeks ago that NPSO had become the operator of BACS and Faster Payments while in the control of just one person, and a natural legal person at that. NPSO has quickly appointed two new Member-Guarantors from amongst its non-executive Board Members - a Ms Ashton who is a "CTO-in-residence" at SAP and a Mr Anderson who is a for...

/payments Transaction Banking

Bob Lyddon

Bob Lyddon Consultant at Lyddon Consulting Services

BACS and Faster Payments privatised to single individual

In a shock announcement BACS and Faster Payments are being run, as of today, by a company controlled by a single private individual. This must be a first for a critical UK national infrastructure. New Payment System Operator issued a press release this morning to say that "Operational responsibility for the Bacs and Faster Payments systems, wh...

/payments UK Faster Payments

Bob Lyddon

Bob Lyddon Consultant at Lyddon Consulting Services

Call for the withdrawal of Wolfsberg Group guidance on SWIFT Relationship Management Application

Occasioned by the recent Financial Standards Board reports on Correspondent Banking and on Remittances, I am of the opinion that Wolfsberg Group's 2016 “Wolfsberg Guidance on SWIFT Relationship Management Application (RMA) Due Diligence” should be withdrawn. I have sent a paper to the Wolsfberg Group to this effect. The guidance has given a clean b...

/payments Trends in Financial Services

Bob Lyddon

Bob Lyddon Consultant at Lyddon Consulting Services

Is the ECB bankrupt, at least on a mark-to-market basis?

Yesterday Reuters published an article entitled "Restive bond markets may complicate ECB's exit plans". This was a piece speculating about how and when the ECB can taper off and finish its Asset Purchase Programme ("APP"), its version of Quantitative Easing. The piece stated that "Currency strength and a doubling of benchma...

SEPA and European Payments

Bob Lyddon

Bob Lyddon Consultant at Lyddon Consulting Services

Ripple: the big story of Q4 2017, but is it any more than that?

Ripple enjoyed high profile in Q4 2017, running its conference in Toronto alongside that of the organisation it aims to take down (SWIFT), seeing the price of its XRP cryptocurrency rise from $0.25 on October 10th to $2.25 on December 31st, and releasing a steady stream of positive publicity about interest in/take-up of its core service: payment m...

/payments Fintech

Bob Lyddon

Bob Lyddon Consultant at Lyddon Consulting Services

Carillion: further detail on recommendations to unsecured creditors. Please share if you know any

Since my earlier blog it has come out that the liquidator is indeed “dealing in” Carillion’s contracts and this is very important for the unsecured creditors who have supplied and remained unpaid in those contracts. The key point is that the liquidator has not repudiated the contracts, and declared them null and void, which was within their gift. T...

/payments /wholesale Financial Supply Chain

Bob Lyddon

Bob Lyddon Consultant at Lyddon Consulting Services

Carillion: who is protecting the Trade and other Unsecured Creditors?

The collapse of Carillion poses an urgent question for participants in Supply Chains who have no payment security, and have made deliveries of goods and services with a credit period. That means almost every business. The question is whether the shareholders will really experience “moral hazard”: do they only make a recovery from the liquidation on...

/payments /regulation Financial Supply Chain

Bob Lyddon

Bob Lyddon Consultant at Lyddon Consulting Services

Predictions for the Payments industry in 2018: the global Remittances business

This is the fourth and final one of our four predictions for the Payments industry in 2018, and it is about the global Remittances business. We all know that this area has been badly hit by “de-risking”, and that the result of that has been the withdrawal by the big clearers in currency centres of correspondent banking services to the banks at the ...

/payments /inclusion Transaction Banking

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