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No, I wasn't referring to SCTinst. I was referring to the payment brand actually called "Faster Payments". 

Nice overview but why no mention of UK "Faster Payments", which, if I'm not mistaken, is the first instant (retail) payments service in Europe.

Because Brexit?:)

EBA Clearning's myBank was supposed to provide "NetBanking" as a mode of payment back in 2010. I predicted that it would go mainstream quickly: Why I Think EBA Clearing's myBank Will Be A Hit . However, I haven't heard anything about myBank since then. One of my predictions gone horribly wrong, I must admit. 

NetBanking has been supported on virtually all ecommerce and bill payment websites in India for over a decade. However, I've rarely used it. Reason: Why pay by "cash" when you can pay by credit card and earn rewards, deferred payment, repudiation and other benefits?

This seems like a form of "Smart Data Discovery", which was predicted by Gartner as one of the 10 hottest tech trends last year. As soon as I read about it, my first thought was "Will Smart Data Discovery transform Data Scientist from the "best paid" profession to "most unemployed" occupation?".

As is usual in the early days of any potentially-human-replacement tech, vendors of Smart Data Discovery have so far been positioning the technology as augmenting data scientists. If it delivers on its promise, Smart Data Discovery has the potential to supplant data scientists. But that should be a blessing since many industries including banking have been complaining of a severe shortage of data scientists (of the human variety, that is).

On a side note, I'm happy to find yet another confirmation of my prediction that Banks Have Nothing To Fear From Fintech.

BigTech has posed a threat to the banking industry for a long time. Still, the mighty Apple put banks at the center of its Apple Pay initiative and the $5 bn loans offered by Amazon to sellers on its platform is probably lower than one hour of loan volumes of the banking industry. IMO, the real question is, how keen are Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and other BigTech companies on entering banking amidst regulation, lower enterprise valuation and other challenges faced by the banking industry? I'm not sure if the answer to that question has changed too much over the years. 

While on the subject, SEPA was supposed to equalize fees for crossborder EURO payments within EUROzone countries to those for domestic EURO payments within each EUROzone country. Anyone knows how much impact SEPA had on the banking industry's revenues and profits?

Uh oh, I think I understand the source of confusion. I mentioned in an earlier comment about Face or Voice being used as the second factor for 2FA. I meant Mobile OTP in the same vein. Implicit is that Password is used as the first factor. Without that, even Biometrics will only be one factor and won't qualify to be 2FA.

tl;dr beyond the section titled decentralized network, mainly because I just finished reading this Bloomberg article which features a software engineer who lost $400K when the founder of Quadriga CX cryptoexchange died without revealing the password.

One. Single. Password.

Sounds extremely centralized to me. How could this happen in Blockchain, which is supposedly decentralized?

Mobile OTP is listed as a 2FA technique by Google Snippet, Wiki and at least one more top search result. Besides, it's used widely by many leading websites as a way of providing 2FA.

So, while I'm no fan of Mobile OTP and I might even consider it to be worse than password, I respectfully disagree with the notion that Mobile OTP is not 2FA. Of course, it is.

In any case, this has nothing to do with Mobile OTP but any type of 2FA technique.

My basic question bears repeating: If a PFM stops working because a few banks have implemented 2FA, will consumer advocates praise the said banks for improving security by implementing 2FA OR will they diss the said banks for being anti-competitive by blocking access to the PFM?