Retail Banking Daily Highlights

Making the list of 'you had one job to do' calamities, the Irish payments app Synch has sunk. At the time of its launch back in 2020, Lafferty Daily Briefing suggested that Synch was a terrible idea, bound for failure. Revolut had gained one million customers in Ireland (from a total population of about 5.5 million). In an effort to compete with Revolut's popular payments system, the Irish Banking And Payments Federation came up with a plan for an alternative payment app (which excluded Revolut) called Synch, which was backed by the three Irish banks AIB, Bank of Ireland, and Permanent TSB. The payment app was developed by Italian payments business Nexi – or 'PayTech business Nexi' as the press releases put it at the time, but the project took several years to get started, with Bank of Ireland struggling to upgrade its tech systems to integrate with the app. (This was, naturally, one of the reasons for the success of Revolut). The Sunday Business Post reported yesterday that a key obstacle to Synch's success was that it didn't occur to the above mentioned shareholders that the app would require central bank authorisation. Former Irish central banker director of enforcement Peter Oakes told the Sunday Business Post that the lack of awareness around authorisation sounded like 'a strategic error on the part of the project management'.