My
previous blog on Faster Payments posed the question whether some/all UK banks were seeing Faster Payments as an opportunity or sideshow? Still
an open question I believe. So it was interesting to see an
article quoting Paul Taylor - Head of International Market Development at Vocalink - promoting the wider application of the base infrastructure for near-realtime payments across wider, principally European markets. There are obvious commercial reasons for
Vocalink to promote this view, but that does not mean it is wrong. It has long been our (i.e. the parties behind the
fastpayments.co.uk industry information website) view that UKFP is designed to be more than a way of removing float (the original OFT requirement) as some banks have already achieved this simply through accounting changes. So to steal a bit from my previous
title - could this be a European opportunity rather than simply a UK show? What do you think?