The following case shows a typical situation where a patient with multiple conditions requires out-of-area care. For the purpose of anonymity, the name and region of the subject have been changed.

Mr Akash Singheera is a 67-year-old man living in the Midlands. He has multiple long-term conditions including type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease (CKD stage 3), ischaemic heart disease, and moderate COPD. He takes more than ten medications daily and receives care from several different providers:

Mastercard’s entry into the world of 24/7/365 global payments should serve as a tocsin call to conservative global banks that five-day weeks, business hours and outdated communications can no longer be justified. Mastercard Move Commercial Payments is the clear embodiment of the realities we’ve been highlighting for years. But now there’s a bigger voice in the playground, it’s time to sit up and listen.

In January, I commented on this website on the progress of ISO20022. Since then, little has changed, despite several initiatives that, one would have hoped, should have accelerated take-up. To be clear, I’m strongly in favour of anything that improves financial transparency. ISO20022 as a standard for communication could bring exceptional opportunities, not just to improve the safety and efficiency of payments, but as a tool to improve detection of malfeasance by pattern recognition and associated activities.

I genuinely and profoundly admire the NHS. It’s under-funded and frequently under-appreciated. But it’s caught in that terrible trap of not having the time to improve. It’s attractive to think that it doesn’t have the budget either, but I believe that there’s a surprisingly simple solution to both problems, if only I could find the right ear with the time to hear it.

Today the news is flooded with reports of a data leak committed by a UK defence official in 2022. We hear about this now because the superinjunction hiding the error finally expired yesterday. It seems that our security systems are more efficient at hiding incompetence than they are at providing security.

On Thursday I attended a remarkable event. It was organised by Answer Digital as a celebration of achievement by various components of the NHS. Pitching it this way was a stroke of genius; it’s too easy to focus on the challenges our health service faces, and to complain about those times when it fails us.

The OECD article on The Future of Tokenization is a useful summation of the current progress to a tokenised model for world commerce. I’ve long been an advocate of a system that restores trade to a transfer of tangible wealth, and tokenisation, in concept at least, provides a route to this goal.

The deadline for financial institutions’ adoption of ISO20022 is now only months away. It’s no longer an issue to deal with “next year”. Progress has unquestionably been made - SWIFT processes more than a million ISO20022 messages a day - but three quarters of banks are still to make the switch. In the US, Fedwire-connected banks need to be ready by March.

Have you noticed how, when you go to the supermarket, you pay virtually no attention to what you’re buying, whether it’s fit for purpose, or even if it’s actually in your trolley?

No, nor me. That would be ridiculous…

Most third-party and even fourth-party payments are entirely legitimate, but there’s no denying that they increase the risk of money-laundering. In this article we look at how easily payments can be streamlined from third- to first-party.

I accept that my obsession with transparency - and the diatribes which it creates - can easily be described as “banging on”. Well today, I’m banging on about why I’m convinced that it’s possible to respect people’s privacy, and the laws that protect it, don’t have to be compromised by openness.

When one of our major network partners described our data storage architecture as a federated ledger, I admit I nodded sagely while wondering:

1: why he was so impressed
2: what he was talking about

Turns out, that’s what we’d invented, and I was the only one who didn’t know it.

Hacked emails can present a very bleak Outlook, as one of our clients learned some months ago. It’s far too easy to fake identities and origins - and mail is, even today - sent in plain text form. And, quite apart from the potential financial penalties, the loss of liquidity - sometimes for many months - can seriously damage a bank’s ability to do business.

Tokenisation and digitialisation of assets have become daily news items, but they seem to be inextricably linked to currency, typically USDC or USDT. This sounds very like tokenising a token; should we instead be working with the inherent value of the asset itself?

Financial messaging isn’t just about SWIFT, Fedwire or the myriad proprietary interfaces deployed by services companies. A cross-border transaction might need to pass through multiple messaging structures on its way. How do we preserve transparency without resorting to time-consuming information requests?