Honestly, I don’t know why you put up with that guy. Here’s how the European Commission opened the Web Payments Workshop event. The whole thing is worth a read (but I highlight key points below):
“As far as EU is concerned, payments is 1% of GDP… but 25% of bank revenues” –W3C Web Payments Workshop
“Card transactions have grown from 7.4% to 17.4% of GDP since 2000 but the price for accepting card payments is not reflecting scale and increased efficiency.” –W3C Web Payments Workshop
“Normally standardization is pro-competitive, but we were concerned in an investigation on epayments by the European Payments Council (EPC) that major players may have banded together to create an exclusionary effect on non-bank epayment mechanisms.” –W3C Web Payments Workshop
“Recently proposed regulation - we want to create a level playing field - it can’t be done by competition enforcement.” –W3C Web Payments Workshop
“So, here’s the proposal: Promote consumer welfare - reduce excessive fees… Increase choice … Promote competition … efficiences should be passed on to consumers… We want to increase competition by increasing transparency and reducing barriers to entry.” –W3C Web Payments Workshop
“There is so much money floating around in this system, banks have not wanted to comply w/ competition law. Mastercard has made no attempt to do anything other than bare necessary changes… Visa has always made changes at very last moment. We haven’t seen lowering of interchange fees. It takes a very long time to force people to do it.” –W3C Web Payments Workshop
… and here’s some stuff from the US side of things:
“How is the US Fed going to weight those comments? In the EU, the government had to step in and mandate it… Ken Isaacson (Senior Vice President at US Fed in NY) responds: Our perspective is an end-to-end perspective. So, we have our high-level objectives. If there’s something in the public interest, we want to support that. Many people said that the only way this is going to happen is to do a mandate - that may be where we’re headed.” –W3C Web Payments Workshop
… and finally a really interesting exchange between the EU Commission (Alexander Gee) and the US Federal reserve (Connie and Ken): –W3C Web Payments Workshop
There’s loads more that’s interesting in there… the British Computer Society said some pretty great things about identity and privacy, Louise Bennett was quite eloquent in her delivery –W3C Web Payments Workshop
I agree, 5 minutes seems like an appropriate time to spend on the Web Payments stuff for the next year. Just keep it high level for now, point hardcore devs to the Community Group that might want to shape the technology or do implementations. We’re short staffed, so getting people that are willing to roll up their sleeves and dive in to do the conversation wrt. use cases, requirements, proposed technologies, and doing implementations would be the best focus for now.