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1. INTRODUCTION
Benjamin Geva is an outstanding scholar in his chosen fields of banking, financial and payments law, with a leading reputation on the world stage. I have known Ben for many years through the International Academy of Commercial and Consumer Law and the Monetary Law Committee of the International Law Association, and it is a privilege to be invited to contribute to this Festschrift. Ben is perhaps best known in international academic circles through his monographs. First, Bank Collections and Payment Transactions1 takes some fundamental problems in banking and payments law, such as fraud and misdirected payments, and subjects them to a careful, comparative analysis, drawing on a wide range of legal systems. A second book, The Payment Order of Antiquity and the Middle Ages,2 is even more astonishing, beginning with payment in Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome, proceeding through Western Europe in the Middle Ages, and arriving at the present day (having taken in Islamic law and Talmud learning on the way). More recently, there is International Negotiable Instruments,3 this time jointly authored, examining this instrument of credit and payment within a broad framework of history, different legal traditions, and the context of electronic systems, highlighting the recurrent issue about which system of law should govern any dispute arising in its use.
In a tribute to Ben, this article explores historically, in an English context, two areas where he has made significant contributions. The first area concerns payments law. Efficient and sound payment systems are crucial to the economy, but their legal dimensions were little explored until Ben began giving them the attention they deserved in a number of clear and thoughtful articles in the 1980s and 1990s.4 Bens massive encyclopaedia, The Law of Electronic Funds Transfers, was first published in the early 1990s, and although oriented to a North American audience, it has been a regular point of reference for audiences elsewhere. One aspect of an efficient payment system is clearing since, as Ben put it in 1991, a clearing system will "economize on the number payments and thereby promote efficiency. Instead of making and receiving individual payments for numerous routine transactions, counterparties settle periodically in bulk, through the clearing house, which acts as a central counterparty."5 In this context, I explore the...