Nowhere is this more true than in payments:Īs domestic habits and demands change, as real-time domestic payments systems are rolled out, and as local Real Time Gross Settlement systems move to 24/7 settlement, banks know they cannot stand still. Tomorrow the habits and preferences of British and German consumers and retailers may be vastly different. A bank that refuses to issue cards or offer online banking in the UK, or ceases to issue cash in Germany, will soon be out of the payments business. It warns that banks must adapt to the changing demands of customers or die:Īdapting to changing customer needs and payment conventions is key to survival in the payments business. In the introduction to its paper, SWIFT also hits out at another group of recalcitrant diehards. That is what SWIFT says it is aiming to create. There is still a need for an interoperability protocol that enables people to transfer value seamlessly across different currencies and tokens.
SWIFT points out that each token would only serve its own community. This is quite a challenge to those who favor multiple competing tokens for international payments. Loops create barriers and friction they reduce fungibility and portability, they limit competition and they fragment liquidity. Doing so would easily solve for a subset – or multiple subsets – of participants, but value needs to move everywhere – from every account, to every account. Importantly, we don’t think that cross-border payments challenges should be solved for with closed loop systems.
0 kommentar(er)
