T2 (formerly known as TARGET2) is a systemically-important payment system and the Real-Time Gross Settlement System (RTGS) for the euro. As such it should be a ‘5-nines’ system, enjoying 99.999% availability during its scheduled operating hours. On 27th February it went down from 10:15 until 18:00 CET, according to the operational update message se...
14 March 2025
Whatever one’s opinion of Nigel Farage, the concept that he can be de-banked should be troubling to everyone. It should be even more troubling to those familiar with the financial industry’s measures to counter financial crime, as remedies being applied by banks are more extreme than is required of them, and may not even be available to them in th...
05 July 2023 Banking
As previously published on News Uncut, courtesy of Jasmine Birtles of Money Magpie and regular columnist in the Daily Mail. It must be great to have money, status and power. A few phonecalls and emails and you can get the UK’s Prime Minister,[1] the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the City Minister and the Science ...
20 March 2023
I have had the temerity to question Open Banking's statistics that claim that eleven million UK adults are (and the formulations differ, which is always suspicious) 'active users of Open Banking', 'benefitting from Open Banking', 'using and garnering the benefits of Open Banking'.
Now it turns out that 60% of UK adults have never heard of it. There are 50 million UK adults, meaning that 20 million UK adults have heard of it, which is does not mean that 11 millions are users and certainly not that 11 million are garnering its benefits.
How much double-counting is there in Open Banking's own figures?
02 Oct 2024 19:06 Read comment
SWIFT announced a service outage on 18th July, in Delphic terms. Were they connected, and, if so, which SWIFT service went down? It could not have been FIN or more systems would have failed (including the UK RTGS, which hasn't migrated to ISO20022 yet, has it?). It cannot for the same reason be InterAct across the board, and it cannot be T-Copy for ISO20022 XML because TARGET2 uses that and it did not go down. So what's left? Answers please, on an MT099, to....
29 Jul 2024 09:02 Read comment
Far too late for the FSB's opposition to be credible, as they have participated in untold FCA/Payment Systems Regulator processes promoting digital payments as well as the Bank of England CBDC Engagement Forum, all advancing the case for a cashless society. They never uttered so much as a whisper of dissent. In doing so they in effect co-opted their membership into a direction-of-travel they now take issue with - too late, no credibility, go home.
08 Feb 2024 17:04 Read comment
Robert BurchConsultant at Independent Consultant
Nick GreenConsultant at ISD Consultants
Yulia GavrilovaConsultant at Serokell
Rajesh TengsheConsultant at TCS
Arun SinghConsultant at TCS
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