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Comment by 8fingerlouie | Hacker News Reader

> The UK on the other hand has actively encouraged new banks and new tech. It’s had things like instant, free, payments between personal accounts for almost two decades. Contactless transactions for at least a decade, mobile banking for decades, and government mandated banking API for almost 5 years.

I think most of those things are EU initiatives, which the UK was a member of at the time.

At least we have all of them in Denmark as well.

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It’s a mix. Many of these innovations came into existence before their EU counterparts. Faster payments, for example, is a completely different system to instant SWIFT payments which most of the EU uses.

Having said that, Denmark is another notable country for its innovation financial systems, ahead of the U.S., many of its EU neighbours and in some areas ahead of the UK.

But the UK has always had a vibrant and innovative financial services sector. Something the EU always had a bit of love-hate relationship with, and something Brexit has seriously damaged.

Instant SEPA, not SWIFT.

> Instant SEPA

Faster payments in the UK don't attract an additional charge. Is this the case for instant SEPA?

> But the UK has always had a vibrant and innovative financial services sector. Something the EU always had a bit of love-hate relationship with, and something Brexit has seriously damaged.

To be fair, most of the regulations were EU ones, but they were driven by the UK as a member, and they supported them nationally.

Contrast Ireland, which has the same EU regs but is much, much further behind the curve because our regulators focus on different things.

> I think most of those things are EU initiatives

no, only the mandated banking API (which is impossible to get access to if you're a startup or an individual)

Counter-anecdote: my brother is building a startup (cashflow forecasting tool, check out https://tailwindapp.eu/) on top of those banking APIs. Granted, he's spent many years in the industry, but as I understand, API access was by far not the hardest part of it.

You're referring to PSD2 / OpenBanking?

What do you mean it's impossible to get access to?

If you're a start-up wanting to share your customers' financial data, you can make an API.

If you're a start-up wanting to get access to your (potential) customers' financial data from other institutions, you can get access through one of the many providers (Tink, GoCardless etc), or become a provider yourself with enough work.

I thought we were talking about PSD2, which the European Parliament adopted in 2015. I recall many startups were launched specifically to capitalise on new opportunities provided by PSD2, so I find your comment confusing.

What am I missing?

the UK had contactless transactions, free instant payments and mobile banking years before PSD2

(the mostly useless open banking stuff is however due to PSD2)

That appears to be a red herring.

In the article, Griffin is described as:

> Their services allow Fintech businesses to integrate banking features quickly and securely.

So this is about integration with other FinTech businesses, which I think squarely falls under open banking and PSD2.

I'm not sure why you describe PSD2 as "mostly useless". Did you vote for Brexit by any chance?

you should prefix all of your posts with "I don't really know much about this topic, but here are my opinions regardless."