Last October, the Central Bank of Ireland added an unexpected company to its roster of digital payment providers — Facebook Payments International Limited. The licence it granted authorised Facebook to provide basic financial services, such as electronic money transfers, to all citizens of the EU.

The social media giant already enables users to send money to each other in its Messenger app, and reportedly will soon add remittances to businesses. The company has acknowledged the Irish licence, but declined to comment on its future plans in this area.

But all the signs are that big tech groups are working to cut out banks as the middlemen, threatening to turn legacy financial institutions into the dumb pipes that feed the back-end infrastructure to the consumer-facing Banks of Amazon, Google or Facebook.