[Openid-specs-fapi] Selecting Bank. Re: European Payments Initiative/Open Banking

[Anders Rundgren]

Yesterday I had a chat with a person who is well-known in the IDM space.  Nowadays he works at Stripe who is one of the major proponents behind the Google/FIDO/W3C/EMVCo SPC standards proposal.

He admitted that selecting bank is a "Difficult Matter" but that it is out of scope for SPC.

Conclusion: selecting bank is an UNRESOLVED PROBLEM [*] which has been left to the "Market" to figure out.  AFAICT, this is valid for Open Banking as well, at least for payments.

What strikes me as somewhat odd, is that payment credentials in a wallet which is a 60 year old, well established concept, haven't been considered.

Since Apple Pay and hundreds of similar systems indeed build on this concept, it seems logical to adopt it also in an Open Banking context.  Ultimately (IMO...) it would make it transparent for the consumer if the payment is powered by an Open Banking TPP or by a more traditional player like Stripe.

Selecting bank is something the PSD2 regulators and CMA probably didn't bother about. Maybe they had looked at national solutions like SOFORT and iDEAL where it doesn't really matter that much?

Thanx,
Anders

*] For card payments, card numbers indirectly offer this information.  For A2A this would not work, and there are no printed cards either.

On 2021-12-03 7:23, Anders Rundgren wrote:
> Hi List,
> I hope you don't find my frequent postings too annoying :)
> Anyway, the time may have come where a serious conversation about wallets and Open Banking could be meaningful.
> 
> Why is that?  Well, the billion euro project known as the European Payments Initiative (https://www.epicompany.eu/) are about creating a wallet that will not only support on-line payments but POS payments and P2P payments as well.  The wallet will also provide an authentication solution.  Similar schemes are already firmly established in Scandinavia.  That is, even "old boring banks" can innovate!
> 
> If EPI succeeds, Open Banking payments will appear dated and limited.  You don't have to analyze things very deep to find problems: Selecting bank when there are thousands to choose from doesn't appear to have a reasonable solution.  With a wallet you select a card of yours, and that's it.
> 
> I claim, that Open Banking without any problems can support a wallet scheme.
> 
> It is a pity that the W3C and FIDO alliance folks ignored the wallet concept: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/570#issuecomment-972578433
> 
> Regards
> Anders Rundgren
>