UK Payments Council Developing Interbank Platform
- The UK Payments Council (organisation focusing on national payments strategy) is about to design a platform to enable British banks to offer m-payment services. Council’s Head of Innovation Richard Martin announces a call for tender to be issued in September for infrastructure design and operation. Commercial launch is planned in 2012.
- Banks will be free to widen their range of mobile services across several media: iPhone / iPad applications, other mobile applications, NFC, Web browser or SMS. The platform will ensure interoperability.
- According to the Council, the role devoted to telecom operators is to add services to the interbank platform: data traffic, monetisation of the digital content they already carry through but used to charge through airtime or micropayments. The interbank platform is targeting the transactional payment segment: the banks will provide ease of use, just as they do with proximity and Internet channels. With time, they hope a mass P2P e-payment method will emerge and maybe provide an alternative to the use of cheques.
- Like with the French i.CB interbank e-wallet, British banks wish to counter mobile operators’ recent joint ventures in many countries (ISIS in the US, Buyster in France, etc.) as well as Central and Eastern European initiatives (Hungary, Czech Republic). In the United Kingdom, a partnership of this kind has been set up in June 2011 between Everything Everywhere, Telefónica and Vodafone.
- One might hope that these efforts will last longer than the different national e-purses initiatives launched in the years 2000: their lack of business model and absence of use cases caused most of them to lag behind.