"At the heart of the Level One Project Guide is a national digital financial services system, enabled by shared, open, standards-based components" Great concept, but initially, the requirement is more simple. Every MFS uses a commercial product, all with different API's. There is as a Step One, no open api standard we can bolt on to various commercial implementations. By taking this first key step, we lower the cost and barriers to external parties integrating with a specific MFS implementation and getting the transaction counts up. Once the transaction counts go up, there is an incentive to competing MFS commercial organisations to integrate with a country wide transaction switch, and the cost of implementing such a switch is lower, as each MFS has probably implemented an Open Common API - every one knows how to get transactions in and out of each MFS that would co-operate with a nations switch. So we can talk about great end goals but until we get each MFS using and supporting an Open Standardised API to expose their services, a national switch is a big leap. Meanwhile at the coal face of a current implementation the only concrete standard I can "sell" internally as beneficial is the GSMA MM API. But I see no one implementing this API, and certainly I know of no one who could use the API work as it stands from Level One.
