Mastercard and Visa extract massive rents from our economies - for the benefit of the banks that own them. Some will have seen that a legal challenge to Mastercard is making progress in the UK, but the real questions is whether we can do without them. I welcome this on Common Weal as a consequence (with an inevitable Sottish orientation given its origin, but applicable much more widely):
Financial Services expert Peter Ryan returns to Common Weal with his latest policy paper advocating for a not-for-profit payments system to be rolled out across Scottish local authorities.
The paper describes how the Scottish Government could use the Payment Services Regulation to set-up their own Scottish Payment Initiation Service as an alternative to paying by Visa, Mastercard or PayPal. This can then be extended to local councils to ensure that the full value of tax payments stay in Scotland rather than increasing the salaries of financial services millionaires.
Read the full policy paper here.
It's worth a read, just to even begin to think about the issue.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
This idea made my day.
In fact I see no reason why every big service such as Uber Paypal etc should not have one public rival.
I vaguely remember Sadik Khan suggesting Transport for London creating an alternative to Uber.
Using the FOSS universe of people – and making such public alternative to the big tech can really infuse hope in public life.
I’m appalled at how complicit they are in illegal activity too. An elderly relative has recently been conned out of a small fortune but the bank and PayPal have been rude and unhelpful to put it mildly. They won’t take any action against the Scammers or even monitor their accounts despite the police telling me they are organised criminals. I mean the scammers but I’m not sure the distinction is needed.
Can anyone recommend any ethical financial institutions worth banking with?
Try Triodos Bank
Thanks for that Richard – will do.
Thanks, I will look them up.
TSB have brought in a Fraud Refund Guarantee. I don’t know how ethical they are – (once upon a time they were a Trustee Savings Bank serving local communities and did nothing fancy) – or the terms of the guarantee. And they had one or two computer problems recently.
My father worked all his life, apart from some time off 1940 – 45, in the Savings Bank of Glasgow as it the was before they amalgamated and were sold off. He used to bring home little piggy banks into which we fed our pennies. I believe as a manager he used to speak to customers.
Another institution like Triodos is the Ecology BS.
The taxpayer did own a payments service – WorldPay, through the nationalisation of RBS. Sold by HM government for £4bn as part of the clearout of RBS assets and resold to private investors some years later for £43bn…
@ Teflon Don
Thanks for this – a startlingly clear reason why ownership matters. The neo-liberal vultures love to say “Oh, it isn’t ownership that matters, but management!”, but always make damn sure they obtain ownership, as it allows them to siphon off wealth, in the form of dividends, or capital realization by sell-offs, or by both. They also ensure that any career development paths, and input follow the money, so that, in the case of the Train Operating Companies that are foreign-owned, British expertise is replaced by the expertise of the foreign-based company, constitution, in effect, the export of our skills-base, but with no income stream returning to the UK, as would have happened with normal exports.
One only has to consider the parlous state of our nuclear industry – the country that had one of the first, if not the first, operational nuclear power station. As to the railways, consider this article: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/apr/11/richard-branson-earned-300m-virgin-rail-franchises?fbclid=IwAR2Z5mfrUXcTKA_GZGIGeDdZybceuRE4YJFU9-wo2kvKThFX4s2Q-hJ118M. That’s £300m that WOULD have come back to the Revenue in earlier times, or been re-invested.
No, ownership matters: management and regulation aren’t enough.
Teflon Don says:
“The taxpayer did own a payments service — WorldPay, through the nationalisation of RBS. Sold by HM government for £4bn as part of the clearout of RBS assets and resold to private investors some years later for £43bn…”
Not a lot of financial acumen visible in the way our governments deal is there ? Is this pure stupidity or deliberate pillaging of the public estate or a bit of both ?
Interesting coincidence that the difference in those figures is £39 billion which passed unnoticed, whereas a similar sum estimated to be our payment due to the EU has people in a state of apoplexy.
Does anybody know what £39 billion even looks like…. ?…….unlikely since it is invisible and doesn’t really exist.
The ATM companies could hardly complain about the free opposition as they’re shutting down ATMs the country over anyway… it could form a useful complement to a public banking initiative. Perhaps the idea should be adopted by local councils, who by now must be realising there’s no immediate hope of any assistance from central government and that they’re on their own, in concert with their each adopting a local currency to float against the other local currencies, this with a view to beginning negotiations with each other over inter-area supplies. Perhaps, post nation-state and city-state, this might herald the rise of the council state.
Richard, thanks for this one, too.
Jim