I have taken on the role for one year of chair of the trade association for the UK’s Payment Institutions. This is the Association of UK Payment Institutions and I will be attempting, as my main focus, to resolve the issue around bank accounts in the UK.
Since UK banks have started their process of de-risking, […]
Important forenote
“It is a great pleasure to make this address to you as the Managing Director designate of the UK’s Payment Systems Regulator.
I would like
simply to outline the nine focus areas for the first year of my tenure in this
role.
With your
kind permission I will dispense with any flannel about the background and any
claims to great […]
The UK was a major participant in the financial bailout of the Republic of Ireland in 2010-2014, and will remain so under the Withdrawal Agreement, notwithstanding its leaving the EU.
The bailout loans from the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism (“EFSM”), the European Financial Stability Facility (“EFSF”) and the International Monetary Fund (“IMF”) totalled EUR62.7 billion, the […]
Today Global Britain launched a joint paper written by ourselves
and Ewen Stewart, entitled “The Irish economic miracle – fact or fiction?”.
Click here to access the paper
The paper exposes how the Republic of Ireland has established
itself as a tax haven within the European Union, to the benefit of itself and
of the mainly US-parented multinationals that have […]
It is surprising to find nothing on the agenda of SIBOS conference or the SWIFT Payments Market Practice Group about the recent court decision that negates vital content of the SWIFT Message Reference Guide and BIS and PMPG documents on the subject of MT202 COV.
The issue is the extent of the MT103 sending bank’s obligation […]
Many
multinational corporates have a pooling arrangement for the cash balances owned
by their various subsidiaries. For example this could be with Bank Mendes Gans
in Amsterdam, under Dutch law, with every subsidiary holding as many currency
accounts as it needs and periodically transferring surplus balances into them,
or drawing funds out if they are needed to […]
FT story of iPagoo’s freezing by the FCA
We have recently blogged about NPA and Pay.UK’s loose governance procedures generally, but we need to focus in on the case of IPagoo/Orwell, and its implications for New Payments Architecture (“NPA”), and whether NPA is soundly based.
NPA is essentially the brainchild of Orwell’s CEO and CTO.
Orwell’s CEO was […]
Having taken a break from following the governance of Pay.UK
for a while, a quick skim underlines the prevailing chaos. We have already
written about the ditching of a key feature of ISO20022 XML and the broken
governance arrangements that have permitted this.
There is a claim to openness about Pay.UK’s affairs, but this is belied by both the […]
Pay.UK was set up to deliver a New Payments Architecture
(“NPA”) for the UK, implementing the blueprint that was passed to them by the
Payment Strategy Forum.
NPA would be based on the usage of the ISO20022 XML data format to enable rich data to flow up and down the payment chain between the two endpoints. This is […]
On the face
of it, SWIFT’s Global Payment Initiative, or “gpi”, should make a major
contribution to monitoring the cost and time expended on cross-border payments.
SWIFT
claims that US$40 trillion of payments were sent over gpi in 2018, that 3,500+
banks have signed up to it, and that over US$300bn are now being sent every day […]