Why I Think EBA Clearing's myBank Will Be A Hit

It is great to see that the EBA is taking a stance on the provision of Online Banking enabled Payments (OBeP's). The awareness of the benefits for all parties (consumers, banks and merchants) that this initiative will bring is most welcome.

There are a couple of points within the comments above that need to be clarified.

1) Some OBeP networks require consumers to share their online banking credentials with a third party who will then login to the bank to create a payment instruction on their behalf. Clearly this puts the consumer in a weak legal position as they will probably have broken the agreement that they have with their bank in which they promise to keep this information private. Clearly these OBeP networks are not going to be endorsed in any shape or form by the banks

2) All of the OBeP's that participate in the global ICPNO (International Council of Payment Network Operators) organisation are bank inclusive, meaning that the banks themselves become members of the network and actively promote it to their consumers. In addition, login credentials are only ever entered by the consumer at the banks own online banking site so the OBeP network operator is, by design, unable (or indeed unwilling) to capture consumer banking details of this nature.

3) The ICPNO is actively piloting cross-border, multi-currency (not just Euro) OBeP payments and two of its members (Giropay and iDEAL) have recently conducted a proof of concept with EPS in Austria to conform with the EPC's requirments.

4) Fostering trust among consumers. The facts speak for themselves: In the Netherlands iDEAL is the preferred method for consumers to conduct e-commerce. It has grown from launch in 2005 to being responsible for over 50% of all Dutch e-commerce transactions. In the US, Secure Vault Payments which went into commercial roll-out in late 2010 will have over 50 million US consumers available to conduct OBeP transactions by the end of 2011.

Online Banking enabled Payments are here to stay and will become increasingly more important to consumers, merchants and banks becuase they are safer, more convenient and significantly reduce the cost of paying online. I have no doubts that the launch of MyBank will accelerate this growth.

For years, I hadn't heard anything about myBank. That changed when I read MyBank-initiated payments hit EUR 10 billion milestone today. 

EUR 10B processing volumes in 6 years does not exactly sound like a blockbuster success in this day and age of $50B per year processed by PayTM in India and >$1T / year processed by Alipay, WeChat et al in China. But it's at least nice to know that myBank is still alive and kicking.