The Senior Lecturer points us toward another economically flawed idea. That Scotland should have its own, government owned, electronic payments system.
The basic idea of a state owned payments system, well, why not? The idea of a new payments system, well, why not? Nothing like market competition to find out what works after all. It’s the justification though which is flawed here.
Currently in the same way that retailers are
subject to interchange fees for the card
payments they take there is a similar economic
case for the Scottish Government to create a
state-owned not-for-profit Scottish Payment
Initiation Service to reduce the amount of fees
it pays to financial services companies and
increase the tax take.