The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) recently mandated that larger banks adopt and maintain a common standard for open APIs (Application Programming Interface) to help create more innovation and competition in the…

  Over the last year, we’ve been talking with many banks and payment service providers about the challenges of instant payments.  The most progressive organisations are looking to instant payments as an…

The revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) has been the cause of much hand-wringing in the banking space, with incumbents foreseeing a future when the new banking giants are Starling, Tandem, Monzo and…

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…