Latest opinions that Bob Lyddon has shared on Finextra

Join the Community

23,317

Expert opinions

42,499

Total members

355

New members (last 30 days)

187

New opinions (last 30 days)

29,094

Total comments

Join Sign in

Bob Lyddon

Consultant

Lyddon Consulting Services

Member since

30 Sep 2007

Location

Thames Ditton

View Bob Lyddon's full profile

Bob's opinions

T2 Disaster Recovery arrangements are synthetic, befitting a synthetic currency

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

FarageGate shows the ‘Trusted KYC Data Sharing’ project must be stopped

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 /payments /crime Banking

Silicon Valley Bank UK saved! UK tech and fintech pantomime can finish its spring season!

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

ISO20022 – The Great Leap Sideways

The payment industry’s migration to the ISO20022 XML data format promises much, or rather the list of promises is long and the same as it has been for a long time, and is very promising: richer data, easier data mining, easier compliance-checking and harmonization (aka everyone else is going to use it so we should too). Multiple years of effort, a...

10 October 2022 /payments /sibos

Card-acquiring market remedies for the UK: as usual, the PSR rolls over

On 6th October 2022 the PSR published its Final Decisions under reference PS22/2 on its ‘work’ on Card-acquiring market remedies, a major and multi-year programme on the costs for UK merchants of accepting payments by card, which primarily means cards branded to Visa and Mastercard. The PSR’s ‘remedies’ fall below the lowest expectations of what c...

09 October 2022 /payments /regulation

UK’s New Payments Architecture now to be a bungalow

What started out as a Temple of Solomon to revolutionise the UK’s payment systems will now be reduced to a more manageable bungalow-sized development. Multiple layers collapse down to one. The UK's Payment Systems Regulator (PSR), who started this show rolling in 2015 by creating the Payment Strategy Forum, has just announced that another of its cr...

30 July 2021 /payments /retail UK Faster Payments

Unicredit ejects the pilot as it prepares to be stuffed in merger with Monte dei Paschi

Jean-Pierre Mustier is to step down as CEO of Unicredit Group, in which he restored Faith and Hope over the last few years. He baulked at Charity: agreeing a merger with Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS) on the terms acceptable to the Italian government. There is a valuation gap of about €20 billion: the Italian government would be wanting about €6 b...

01 December 2020 /retail /wholesale

Protecting global financial markets from Eurozone systemic risk

The Euro is a currency without a Eurozone sovereign legal person backing it. Swathes of Eurozone financial assets are rated and accounted for as if there was such a legal person, whereas the backing for these assets is far less impressive. The consequence is that the Eurozone financial system is far less well-capitalised than it appears, and that m...

28 February 2020 /retail /wholesale

MT202 COV defunct thanks to court decision

It is surprising to find nothing on the agenda of SIBOS conference or the SWIFT Payments Market Practice Group about the recent court decision that negates vital content of the SWIFT Message Reference Guide and BIS and PMPG documents on the subject of MT202 COV. The issue is the extent of the MT103 sending bank’s obligation to the MT103 receiving ...

24 September 2019 /payments /sibos

iPagoo’s insolvency puts question mark against NPA

We have recently blogged about NPA and Pay.UK’s loose governance procedures generally, but we need to focus in on the case of iPagoo/Orwell, and its implications for New Payments Architecture (“NPA”), and whether it is soundly based. NPA is essentially the brainchild of Orwell’s CEO and CTO. Orwell’s CEO was a full member of the Payment Strategy Fo...

29 August 2019 /payments /startups