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Comment by lorddoig | Hacker News Reader

Banks working together is a scary idea. This was the notion atop which the recently disbanded Payments Council (UK) was based - an organisation that failed to deprecate BACS/CHAPS, had to be told to implement Faster Payments, came up with the 'innovative' pay-by-mobile-number scheme, and replaced swipe & sign card payments with a JavaCard that knows it's own 4-digit PIN.

Feast your eyes, ladies and gents. What you are witnessing is the formation of a cartel.

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Banks are already working together in a lot of fields.

Before it's IPO, Mastercard was owned by 25k+ banks; Visa is still owned by 21k+ banks; SWIFT, the network behind transactions, is owned by banks too. That's just three examples I know but i'm sure you can find a lot of them.

What do you mean by 25k+ banks? There were 25,000 different banks that owned Mastercard? Or is a 25k+ bank a particular type of bank.. Not come across that term before.

"Prior to its initial public offering, MasterCard Worldwide was a cooperative owned by the 25,000+ financial institutions that issue its branded cards." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MasterCard

How would you prefer technical standards be established?

It's not just technical though. BACS/CHAPS (payment systems that take days to move money and cost about £30 a go) would never die while banks had control of common technical standards. They're absurd. These standards mandate that each network hop include a holding delay measured in tens of hours. From light speed to days and why? Because it's a cash cow they'd be insane to mess with.

Bike-shedding on mailing lists has produced some... interesting protocol decisions in the past.

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