Global Payments
The International Payments Framework is an interesting project coordianted by NACHA’s Global Payments Forum. It is seeking members to support the initiative. As I reviewed the Concept Paper, I was both thrilled and disappointed.
It’s thrilling to consider forming an organization that works together to improve the movement of non-urgent payments to member banks across the globe. Nice!
Now the disappointing part, the paper suggests that governance establish two catagories of members. Voting (banks and CSMs-Clearing and Settlement Mechanisms) and Non-Voting (software vendors, users, and associations representatives). So here’s the question. Why are the users non-voting? Why wouldn’t members from the users community be nominated to the board and given voting rights? And how about software vendors? Why couldn’t they vote? Why does the voting have to be limited to member banks?
This structure sounds similar to Visa and MasterCard’s structure prior to their IPO’s where their largest member banks essentially controlled the board.
I’m going to follow this initiative and see how it goes.
