The UK payments ecosystem has been praised as one of the best in the world, with the overall user experience backed as one that truly stands out in the global market.
Comments came from former Nationwide CEO, Joe Garner, who addressed delegates during his keynote at The Payment Association’s Pay360 Conference this week.
However, Garner also outlined the challenges that Open Banking has endured as it sought to continue expansion into the mainstream. He described it as having a ‘difficult birth’ and although the space has now developed to the point of being used for ‘impressive customer journeys’ it still requires evolution for its continued expansion.
There is an elevated necessity for sustainable commercials on Open Banking and much more work is needed on consumer protection, Garner reiterated his arguments from the Future of Payments Review.
It comes at a time when the increased adoption of Open Banking is of pivotal nature for the gambling industry, with affordability checks being more stringent. It is believed that tapping into Open Banking tech can enable these affordability checks to take place in a manner that is as unobtrusive as possible.
Garner went on to emphasise that the main challenge in predicting where British payments will be several years down the line is that the world is currently going through a ‘replatforming of money’.
Replatforming has been seen in the past. People trading with gold, silver and other high value items then transitioned into money and the use of the cash, as seen over the past couple of hundred years. We are now seeing a digital transition, Garner said, predicting that the next replatforming will see ‘some form of the tokenization of money’.
Should Garner’s projections be correct we could see a significant spike ‘money moving from a static holding to a visible token’, which is where the growth of blockchain technology could become more prevalent.
As economic and technological changes continue, the UK needs to ensure it has a ‘North Star’ which it can pinpoint its payments vision on, Garner asserted to the crowd.
“There is no clear vision or strategy of where we’re going overall,” he said, cautioning that this risks increasing fragmentation, something which most payments and finance stakeholders can likely agree is not good for anyone.
