Yes, PSD2 has driven the need for all banks in Europe to offer an Open Banking API, and with that you can have „transaction/payment initiation“. That is a „push“ transaction from one party to another. Sofort is one of the very early systems that uses that process (actually predates PSD2 by quite a bit), and did the push by screen scraping your online banking UI. Still SEPA transactions are not very quick - from Sparkasse to Solaris takes about 36 hours. From AIB (Ireland) to Sparkasse can be as short as 6 hours.
In my introduction I mentioned „real-time“, and low cost. These are important features, and driven by the technology somewhat. Usability is very important to me - hence QR codes (like Swish) and connection by shorter identities (mobile phone numbers and/or Swish like identities) are important.
A transaction initiator (Sofort) under PSD2 does require to be regulated by BaFin. It’s not too onerous, as you’re not holding the money.
An activity like PayPal, where you hold the money requires almost a full banking licence. I kind of think that holding the money makes it easier to show real-time transfer, with SEPA transfers following slowly in the background.
I think we could get the technology (and regulation) to work. That’s less of a problem.
How do you persuade 10,000,000 citizens to participate in this scheme, and use it weekly? You don’t need this number on day #1, but within 2-3 years, you’d want a consistent and regular user base.
Tomorrow or Solaris could provide a transaction hub that allows the other APIs and interfaces to be integrated, and do the kind of things that the EPC talk about in Frnk’s link.
Technology is „easy“, it’s the „adoption“ that is hard.
I still don’t see why more infrastructure is necessary. Kwitt, the Sparkasse P2P, is based on instant SEPA transfers.
Interoperability is key. If Solarisbank would adopt Kwitt for P2P, the user base might be large enough to get it going. I don’t think building another platform without interoperability from the very beginning is going to work.
I think proprietary solutions as Kwitt or Paypal are not ideal, as they create a dependency to a single organization, which can change it’s business objective or raise fees over time. True interoperatibility would go on line with an open system such as SEPA Instant Transfers, as you mention. This would require everyone to perform intuitive instant SEPA transfers from the mobile device - something which not every bank offers (QR code, easy TAN method).
Another approach is the new Deutsche Kreditindustrie solution „X“, which will unite Paydirekt and Giropay. Hopefully it will be a true Paypal compentitor, similar to the Swedish solution Swish and come with lower fees then Credit Cards (such as Girocard or even lower). But for German/EU companies it was always hard to agree on common standards.
How „proprietary“ is Kwitt when the Kartellamt told Sparkasse and VR-Banken to allow access for all banks that are interested? It’s basically a SEPA instant credit transfer, with a cellphone number lookup service. It’s super low tech.
Interoperability is so limited, because banks aren’t interested in this. And the compelling thing about the concept described here is that all the parts are already here: most neobanks already offer instant P2P transfers based on phone numbers / usernames on their platform (Revolut, Sparkasse, VR-Banken, N26 … ), the settlement is either proprietary or SCT Inst, and the only part that is missing is a lookup service that would connect them.
Ich persönlich habe kein Problem mit Englisch, ich empfinde es nur als sehr unhöflich den Leuten gegenüber, die vielleicht nicht so gut diese Sprache können und sich auch an dem Gespräch beteiligen möchten.
So. Thema wieder offen. Das Thema Sprachen des Forums ist jetzt ausgegliedert worden. Bitte diskutiert sachlich und respektvoll dort weiter. → [Forum] Sprachen
Ihr findet dort auch ein offizielles Statement vonseiten Tomorrows. Happy discussion!
Thanks for the comments and directions - especially Kwitt (which I had forgotten about), and GNU Taler.
The core of my question relates to behaviour rather than technology, although the two are connected. Changing behaviour generally involves a carrot/stick approach, where you offer some benefit to drive the change, and subsequently make the older process less attractive.
The payments industry did this with chip cards, firstly by making chip transactions a little cheaper for the merchant, and then making the non-chip participant liable for counterfeit fraud. Now there are 9B chip cards in the world for payment.
Solaris supporting Kwitt, and the Tomorrow App having the QR codes to drive it would be cool. Tomorrow App QR code display to a Sparkasse App QR code reader would be great, but I’m ahead of myself.
Can P2P in a domestic German context be… sustainable, low cost, useful, needed, easy to use, safe, secure, quick, reliable, inclusive and interoperable? I think we’d need a big yes to all of these before looking at a specific technology solution.
For me, the critical detail is seeing it as commodity.
This is where Cringle failed. Cringle had a good app, good UX, and a simple technology (basically what Kwitt does, just with „regular“ SEPA transfers). And they had the support of Germany’s 2nd largest online bank DKB, which also invested in the startup.
It was integrated into the DKB app to some extend, and customers who didn’t have their account with DKB could download the app, register their third party account, and the use it that way.
Cringle’s business model was to convince other banks besides DKB to integrate it in their banking apps – and pay for that. Because Cringle wasn’t able to make any money from customers using the product.
So, if I would stumble into an elevator and someone would pitch the idea for a P2P payment service, I would ask these questions: how would you convince bank account services to invest in your business, and what’s the general idea of where revenue is supposed to come from? Like Paypal, where the product is (mostly) free for consumers and expensive for businesses? Is the convenience of having it integrated in your account enough to convince you to use it, when you also could just use SCT inst (SEPA instant credit transfer)? How would you achieve a critical mass of accounts that can be reached via your product, assuming it uses some sort of look-up service, where users register with their phone number, @username or email address?
Further random bullet points:
– Start with Kwitt to integrate with the largest user base in Germany
– QR-codes is a fun idea to skip the look-up service in situations where users want to use that.
– integrate with social media / messaging platforms: „Siri, send Aiden 5 quid for drinks.“
