Latest opinions that Bob Lyddon has shared on Finextra

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Bob Lyddon

Consultant

Lyddon Consulting Services

Member since

30 Sep 2007

Location

Thames Ditton

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Bob's opinions

Predictions for the Payments industry in 2018: new EU Treaty signed for full EMU

This is the third of our predictions for the Payments industry in 2018, and it is about the Euro and its path to full completion. Brexit is both a threat and an opportunity for the “centralisers” at the European Commission. Their arguments will be firstly that the Single Market and the Customs Union (“Economic” union) cannot work properly and be co...

31 December 2017 /payments SEPA and European Payments

Predictions for the Payments industry in 2018 - New Entrants

This is the second of our predictions for the Payments industry in 2018, and it is about New Entrants to the payments business. The main focus is on Third-Party Providers and Payment Institutions as ordained under Payment Services Directive. We should also mention eMoney Institutions and – more UK-centric – Challenger Banks. In sum these are the ty...

29 December 2017 /payments /startups Transaction Banking

Predictions for the Payments industry in 2018 - Open Banking

This is the first of our predictions for the Payments industry in 2018, and it is about the UK's Open Banking. This is a very high-profile and government-endorsed project to open up Retail and SME banking to technology-based new entrants, who will offer innovative and exciting propositions on top of the data they can receive from banks, and the pay...

27 December 2017 /startups Disruption in Retail Banking

Unicredit's Non-Performing Loans - deteriorating again, but you wouldn't know it from the publicity

Unicredit gave a "Capital Markets Day" in London on 12/12/17 and what an upbeat event it was, accompanied by a slidedeck full of green ticks and words like "signed" and "completed", whatever those words actually mean, and probably a lot less than they were meant to signify. What was shocking, though, was the way Non-P...

14 December 2017 /wholesale Financial Services Regulation

Unicredit's FINO project and its recapitalisation as a whole

We have published a research paper - you can find it in the section "Research Papers and Training Agendas" on our website - about Unicredit's "recapitalisation". It focuses on: the rights issue for €13.0 billion launched in Q1 2017 to fund the bank's Strategic Plan the charges and provisions taken by the bank in Q4 2016, which ...

10 December 2017 /wholesale Trends in Financial Services

UK NPA Blueprint rubber-stamped

The report (119 pages) on the consultation on the Blueprint for the UK's New Payments Architecture was finally made available on the Payment Strategy Forum website at about 3:30 pm today, on a page that had already been written in advance to say that "In December 2017 the Forum concluded its work and delivered its final Blueprint. Its work ha...

08 December 2017 /payments Transaction Banking

The UK Autumn 2017 Budget - the small print

It has become tradition for the Chancellor’s Budget speech to become shorter as the supporting documents become thicker. Here are some of the interesting points in it, including detail on some of the headline points – like Stamp Duty – that did not make it into the speech. The supporting document this time is 88 pages of writing and 5 pages of titl...

23 November 2017

Forget Bermuda & look at the 'legal' tax avoidance within the EU

Brexit negotiations resume this week with the UK government reportedly going to cave in to a bill of EUR60 billion in exchange for a trade deal, their not having worked out how detrimental the current trade deal is to the UK. Over and above the £30 billion per annum net cost to the UK exchequer of providing public services to the 3.6 million EU eco...

06 November 2017

How to torpedo the Catalonian economy, in about 25 minutes

Catalonia is not a part of the SEPA Area; it has no central bank and so it has no Eurosystem member. Its financial infrastructure is, however, SEPA-compliant, meaning domestic and cross-border high-value payments are made and received through TARGET2, domestic low-value through Iberpay, and cross-border low-value through Iberpay and EBA STEP2. Bank...

28 October 2017 /payments /inclusion Fintech innovation and startups

eMoney safeguarding regime in question

There are growing concerns about the safeguarding regime for client funds held by eMoney Institutions, attributable firstly to the demise of Banco Popular Espanol, an institution eligible to take safeguarded funds and which went down despite having passed its stress tests, liquidity tests and all. The legal challenge being mounted by holders of Ti...

26 October 2017 Digital Banking Trends