FTX shines a light on crypto people – do we want them replacing our UK cash with their digital currency?

Published on 21 November 2022

Sir Jon Cunliffe, Deputy Governor of Financial Stability, Bank of England, sees no contradiction between the rampant instability on Planet Cryptocurrency and the Bank’s plans to replace our cash with its own UK version of a cryptocurrency. This is the message today from the most senior person responsible for the stability […]

‘CAPTURE’ – a major new paper on the committees considering a UK Central Bank Digital Currency

Published on 7 November 2022

UK payments have, over the last ten years, become increasingly digital and become the domain of a technocratic elite, working in tandem with Big Tech and the major payment card brands.

The UK’s ‘digital payments journey’ thus far has left an amount of damaging debris on the road behind it: Authorized Push […]

ISO20022 – The Great Leap Sideways

Published on 13 October 2022

The payment industry’s migration to the ISO20022 XML data format promises much, or rather the list of promises is long and the same as it has been for a long time, and is very promising: richer data, easier data mining, easier compliance-checking and harmonization (aka everyone else is going to use […]

The Payment Systems Regulator’s PS22/2 Card-acquiring market remedies: final decision = surrender

Published on 6 October 2022

On 6th October 2022 the PSR published its Final Decisions on its major and multi-year ‘work’ on the costs of accepting card payments for merchants. Costs, in this case, focuses on the service fees paid by a merchant to its appointed merchant acquirer. The all-in costs include the deductions-from-face-value, which the […]

Apparatus for UK’s financial management is dead in the water

Blog published on 18 August 2022 based on an article published on www.facts4eu.org on 12 August 2022

A major change in the financial management of the UK is needed. The current upsurge in inflation may have been triggered by energy prices, but the seedbed for it has been in the creation since the Global Financial Crisis […]