An article relating to this blog post on Finextra:
Failed payments costing Europe's banks EUR21bn a year - Misys
Despite the introduction of the single euro payments area this year, failed cross border transactions are costing European banks EUR21 billion a year, according to Misys.
See article
If the Misys data are correct we are sitting atop a volcano that is just about to blow! Firstly forty one percent of failed cross-border transactions is appalling! This means that almost every second cross-border transaction is not passing muster. This also
raises two very clear and critical issues - transparency and operational risk.
On the transparency side my question is; "Is this failure rate deliberate on the part of the banks?" I assume that the EUR36 a time "cost" is not a real cost but what banks are charging for making the repair. I have enough experience in activity based costing
in bank transaction processing to know that this number is certainly well padded. So, being the cynic that I am, it would make sense for a lot of banks to grow their revenues from these failures, however insignificant some of the faults might be. Also, once
a payment has failed, how keen are banks on educating their customers to see that the failure does not recur?
On the operational risk side the comment that these cross-border payment failures are "... caused by a number of factors including weak payment initiation controls, poor process monitoring and problems during clearing and settlement" has sent me to "Red-Alert".
If this is true, and if this affects almost half of all European cross-border payments then we are sitting on an operational risk disaster of huge magnitude just waiting to happen.
Please someone .... tell me that I am dreaming.