The end of 2016 witnessed an excellent step by the Hungarian Central Bank (MNB) – the release of the ‘Operational model of the instant payment service in Hungary’. It is remarkable for…

Over the last couple of weeks the media agenda has been dominated by Payment Services Directive Two (PSD2), and unfortunately not for the right reasons. PSD2 has always been a controversial regulation,…

While the world was waiting with bated breath and crossed fingers for the outcome of the American Presidential race and Election Night events being organised around the world, on other side of…

While reading through the second payments service directive and trying to decipher the recently published RTS draft, I have been trying hard (without much success) not to draw parallels between the soon…

Icon’s Payments team have just returned from the FinExtra’s  NextGen Banking conference in Helsinki, Finland and thought we’d share some highlights from the event. To open the event, Erkki Poutiainen summed up…

I was recently on a panel at NextGen Banking Nordics, discussing PSD2 (of course) where I was pretty critical of the draft Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) on Secure Customer Authentication. After the discussion, a…

The Access to Accounts provisions of PSD2 oblige banks to allow third parties (TPPs) to access bank details and initiate payments on behalf of the bank’s customers. The huge unanswered question is,…

Following on from the topic of fragmentation in Part 1, we have much to discuss. Techno-genies, the value chain and realism Rather than lamenting the lack of international interoperability, we should consider whether…

Fragmentation has become a very real challenge for the industry as instant payment schemes are being implemented on a country by country basis, and each country is doing it differently. Like the…