Welcome to Finextra. We use cookies to help us to deliver our services. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you may change your preferences at our Cookie Centre.
Please read our Privacy Policy.

Accept
Channels
Profile
Location
London
Member since
2010
Writes about
Payments Retail banking

Andy's blog archive

2012 (2) 2011 (2)
Andy Hunter

Andy Hunter

CEO at Perficiam Ltd
Message Message me Posts: 4 Comments: 13
Bio I have worked in Financial Services for almost 40 years with NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland and VocaLink. For the last 20 years I have specialised in payments and e-commerce. I now run my own consultancy practice, Perficiam. Career History I headed NatWest's Corporate Marketing and Corporate Payments functions for much of the 1990s, sponsoring - amongst other things - the development of corporate online banking and launch of the first UK Purchasing Card. I moved to the e-commerce practice when online trading began to develop and lau

Blogs

Transaction Banking

Making UK Payments Regulation Work

06 Aug 2012

Government's decision to wind up the Payments Council and vest control in some form of statutory body raises serious issues of governance and commerciality. The underlying assumption that civil servants are better able to determine market preference than bank executives seems an unlikely scenario. State managed Skoda was a constant butt of humour ...

1

Transaction Banking

The Law Of Unintended Consequences

11 Mar 2012

When, in 1984, the marketing team at Midland Bank first removed charges from some personal accounts, they couldn't have guessed at the long term consequences for the UK retail market. At a time when cross sales of new services like mortgages and structured savings products was beginning to drive retail revenues, their objective was to win more c...

3

Innovation in Financial Services

The innovative world of UK payments

01 Mar 2011

UK politicians often accuse the banks of failure to innovate in payments. The UK Payments Council was at least partly created and empowered to change this position but has so far failed to make its presence felt. So what's gone wrong? Firstly, the basic premise is deeply flawed. The UK payments industry is very innovative. Over the last twenty y

1

UK Faster Payments

Making Faster Payments work

07 Feb 2011

There was a time when bank marketing departments offered well crafted products delivering genuine value for money, but that doesn't seem to be the case now. Advertising is dominated by savings accounts paying way below inflation, and cash incentives to switch banks for no reason other than the cash itself. Whatever happened to the value propositio...

7

See all Andy's blogs

Andy is Commenting on

Three-in-four APP fraud cases rejected by banks overturned by Financial Ombudsman

  The banks need to get their arms around this before liability escalates. COP is patchy and it is unreasonable to give identity risk to the consumer. In the cheques world, this risk rests with the banks who are far better placed to accept it and the system works well. If the same princinciple was applied here it would be much easier to defend those more difficult claims that transactions should have been blocked because they were not in the remitter's best interests.

12 Nov 2021 Reply Read article

‘If we fix digital identity, we fix payments,’ Tony McLaughlin

  Tony talks a lot of sense here (as he always does). Consumers are wary of push payments because there is no certainty of payee identity. As Tony says, there are many means by which this can be achieved but banks will never agree amongst themselves which scheme is best and when it should be adopted, so Government intervention is essential. The model for this is the Cheques Act which says it is the banks’ responsibility to ensure a cheque payable to Tony McLaughlin reaches Tony’s account and insists they put matters right if it does not. It has worked very effectively for more than 60 years  and I commend it to the PSR!  

02 Oct 2019 Reply Read article

Strong Consumer Authentication - a project for the banks?

  In the UK at least, the focus on strong authentication misses the point. Whilst it might allow banks greater assurance about customer instructions, it does nothing to help customers accurately describe their intended payee. In consequence consumers continue inadvertantly to pay huge sums to fraudsters, many of whom are organised criminals. The industry should hang its head in shame and deal with this situation decisively. 

13 May 2019 Reply Read article

Access to cash system on verge of collapse warns report

  This is more than a little over-dramatic. With around 70,000 ATMs, 11,000 Post Office branches and 9,000 bank branches in the UK there's still a long way to go. Lloyds announcement about commercialising cashback seems positive, however. When I was involved in the remittance market, I recall colleagues in India referring to this as the 'Human ATM'!

08 Mar 2019 Reply Read article