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Lol. "A waiting list of 50,000 customers" out of a population of 63 million+...and now they've stomped off back to Deutschland and taken their Fussball within them. Sounds like their offering and/or onboarding processes bombed and they need to blame something other than themselves.

@ketharaman I have really enjoyed your comments in this thread. ISO20022 is ‘Global’ because it is used here and there around the globe. The UK is adopting it because the USA looks as if they are adopting it and vice versa: no-one appears to be adopting it because they think it is good. The issue for me is not when the migration starts but when MT messages get taken down and FIN ceases to be available. SEPA saw slow take-up until it was made mandatory by law: the SEPA Migration End Date Regulation. There cannot be an equivalent mandated on every SWIFT member, so I can imagine the migration continuing into the 2030s.

A 42-character name including spaces should not impose completely insuperable difficulties, using 59F Beneficiary Customer with either No letter option or F. Under No letter option the name can run over the first line of 35 characters and just have LIMITED on the second line; I believe you can then leave a space and start the address, for which you have the balance of the 35 characters on that line and two more lines of 35 characters, and there are no network validated rules for No letter option aside from that Account must be present, and any BIC and IBAN must be valid ones. The data is unstructured in that case. Under F - the structured option - both the first and second lines would have to start with 1/ and you could have the first 33 characters on the first one, with the final word being PRIVAT. The next line would be 1/E LIMITED. You could not start the Address Line until the following line, and you must have 3/Country and Town if you have 2/Address Line, or it will fail a network validated rule. So actually you only have one line for the address, of up to 33 characters. Shortening to Pte Ltd would not get it onto one line and free up another line for 2/Address Line, because you would still have 34 characters with the spaces. Can't you cut out the s at the end of Solutions as well, or run GTM360Marketing together as one word? See, that was easy, wasn't it? I would not see this as a "failure in the SWIFT system" but rather a lack of capacity in the field lengths, which leads to the discrepancy at the beneficiary bank. That should all be remedied by the usage of ISO20022 XML (in our dreams, I suspect) :)

It turns out that iPagoo was never a Pay.UK Member/Guarantor. The two sets of missing Board Minutes have now been put up on the Pay.UK website after my request. The suspension of a member of one of their payment systems does not require the agreement of the Pay.UK Board: the discussion in the 27th February meeting about Delegated Authority dealt with this issue, albeit in a circumlocutive way. It was agreed, without its being stated, that the BACS and FPS management could suspend iPagoo under their own authority, without its being referred to Pay.UK's Board.

Nets has a quasi-monopoly in the Nordics but at the same time Mastercard has not bought all of it. Then you have the P27 project which recently selected Mastercard as Nordic payment infrastructure partner, so there are a few moving parts...but it is disturbing to see a deal that effectively knocks out Mastercard/Vocalink's main rival for the UK NPA contract. NPA is worth the combination of FPS, BACS and cheque/bank giro credit flows for many years, as all of it will clear through the NPA central architecture, plus you will have the Request to Pay and Confirmation of Payee messaging, and probably more.

This is too coincidental with the deadline for the responses to Pay.UK's RFI for New Payments Architecture. Visa were proposing to bid with Nets, and using the asset that Mastercard have now bought. The transaction kicks a main rival for NPA into touch, and increases the bid chances of Vocalink, a Mastercard company. The RFI should be pulled by Pay.UK and this deal referred to competition authorities.

RIP Innovation? Your position-taking really won’t do, zeer geachte Mijnheer David Brear (“spijtig, sjefke, dat gaat niet” – I’ve translated a few pieces for your Dutch hosts over there at Money 2020 – by the way, any Singing in the Rai yet?). The report speaks of an implausible Damascene conversion. You have positioned yourself for some time as a change agent in this field through your 11FS consulting business, and been counted amongst the elect of Hoch- und Hypemeister, sowing your ideas in a panel here, a workshop there, a podcast, an awards ceremony, a webinar, on a quite frenetic “I’ve been everywhere, man” (“Ik was al overal, manneke”) to spread the Fintech gospel…and now suddenly, according to you (“volgens jouw”), it’s all a load of rubbish (“het is meteen allemaal kloten”). The seed has fallen on stony ground, or dry ground, or wet ground, or in the Ijsselmeer. If it has, then the worst that can laid at other people’s doors is that they may have lent excessive ear to the change agents and evangelists. All I can say, in true Victor Meldrew style, is Ongelooflijk („Unbelievable“)!

With the greatest of respect the many changes in industry governance were meant to stop major decisions being made based on the cost to the industry and individual opinions about this or that payment service, and yet these seem still to be the factors driving the agenda. The cheque has a guard against fraud in the crossing "Account Payee": if it is paid into the wrong account, it is not the payer's liability. That distinguishes it from a Faster Payment and protects the payer from Authorised Push Payment Fraud. Cheques should not be de-emphasized until the "new" payment services replicate that benefit for the payer.

For a boring piece you seem to have read a lot of it.

Yes, that's right, Paul, and a good example of the pot calling the kettle black, as the BoE illuminates all sorts of supposed problems in the UK financial world without ever considering itself and its contribution to the problems (e.g. the increase in highly-leveraged corporate loans, enabled by their own Funding for Lending scheme).