No worries - there is hardly an obligation for you to respond :). Re that anonymous payments idea - you are thinking along the same lines as me re the email an

No worries - there is hardly an obligation for you to respond :). Re that anonymous payments idea - you are thinking along the same lines as me re the email and billing address. Getting all the junk/advertising email sent to one place would be a good feature. Really though, asking people to pay for anonymous transactions is simply an 'in'. I don't think there is a big market there, but I think there is _a_ market. The goal would be to use that as a springboard to start offering banking services to consumers (e.g. credit, payment consolidation), and merchant banking to online retailers (similar services plus others, e.g. perhaps you could buy a saas business' future cash flows off of them). If you were able to own both sides of that you would not only make it much easier for people to interact with new online businesses safely, but also provide an integrated identity/payments service to said businesses. You would aim to reduce the cost of the original product to 0 as you became able to generate revenue in other ways. --- The acquiring idea... You have some interesting thoughts here. Yes I think you're right that finding an incentive for consumers to use the service is not immediately obvious. Long run, I do think that you would be able to offer credit (both to merchants and consumers) and other financial services but I don't think that is a viable 'way in' for the business. To start with, I think it needs something simpler and more obvious that you can support with a relatively small number of customers. Ideally without stepping over more regulatory boundaries... you mention discounts and I think that they are the obvious target (though I may well be wrong). I also think that discounting (or other offers) for small businesses is not very well served currently. Here's an example (fairly arbitrary) of how you could try and kick the thing off - it's obviously a sort of growth hack but its semi-believable. Pick a student city and convince a load of local bars/restaurants to sign up on the merchant end by promising them no fees and a way to advertise offers to the next batch of students without having to put up flyers and so on. You would then get students to sign up with the promise that they will be able to use it to get cheap food and drinks. You would monetise by charging a referral fee on people redeeming the offers via the app. If that worked, you would replicate the model in other cities while also trying to expand the number of merchants signed up in existing cities (to appeal to more than just students). Long run, I think the goal of this business would be to offer both merchant and retail banking services on top of the payments system. In addition to that, you could also open up your platform for other financial service providers - with a referral fee or service charge model. Your idea of implementing this via open banking is quite interesting - I must admit, I didn't actually think of that. Would you be interested to talk about this in a more... tangible way? You can reach me on ideasaintworthmuch at mail dot com (mail is not a typo for gmail).