Payments

The European Commission is running a conference this week about financial inclusion and the unbanked. According to the Commission, almost half of all of the citizens of the EU10 – Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia and other recent joiners, but not Bulgaria and Romania – have no bank account. According to their research, 47% of…

The SWIFT Annual Report came out last Friday (download it here, 3.4 Megabytes) and makes for some interesting reading, especially as I like numbers.  Yes, it does include lots of numbers: there are 8,332 institutions connected to SWIFT (note: institutions, not banks) across 208 countries and territories; over 3.5 billion FIN messages exchanged last year…

The SWIFT Annual Report came out last Friday (download it here, 3.4 Megabytes) and makes for some interesting reading, especially as I like numbers.  Yes, it does include lots of numbers: there are 8,332 institutions connected to SWIFT (note: institutions, not banks) across 208 countries and territories; over 3.5 billion FIN messages exchanged last year…

You may not have realised it, but today is Europe Day. In the UK, we took especial notice of Europe Day by not mentioning it in the news, not talking about it on TV, not referring to it on the radio and avoiding any reference to it in the newspapers. However, there are some things…

You may not have realised it, but today is Europe Day. In the UK, we took especial notice of Europe Day by not mentioning it in the news, not talking about it on TV, not referring to it on the radio and avoiding any reference to it in the newspapers. However, there are some things…

You may not have realised it, but today is Europe Day. In the UK, we took especial notice of Europe Day by not mentioning it in the news, not talking about it on TV, not referring to it on the radio and avoiding any reference to it in the newspapers. However, there are some things…

If payments is just transferring a file electronically between a sender and a recipient these days, why is it so darned complicated? Bearing in mind, the internet connects everyone and everything electronically, how come we have so many disparate payments infrastructures? From retail to wholesale payments, clearing and settlement, we do have a bit of…

This was a comment I made during a panel at the ACT Conference in Edinburgh, where I joined esteemed speakers in a BBC Question Time style debate, chaired by Andrew Neil, the political journalist and writer. The other speakers on the panel were: Angela Knight CBE, CEO, British Bankers’ Association;  Robert Waugh, Head of UK…

I’ve been reading a range of articles about the next generation internet, or the semantic web as it is called by those in the trade. Semantic is a method of looking for the meaning and relationships between things, and the semantic web effectively moves us away from files and downloads to databases and integration. In…

Unlike some of the sceptics about SEPA, I believe we are finally getting there. There’s still a long road ahead – the SEPA Direct Debits (SDD), the Payment Services Directive, effective card schemes using the SEPA Card Framework (SCF), D+1 and more still need to be implemented – but we are heading in the right…