EBAday: online payments - it's all about mobile

Unsurprisingly, EBA Clearing's just-announced plans for a pan-European e-payments service - dubbed mybank - took up a fair chunk of EBAday's ‘innovation in online payments and e-services' session.

There was just a hint of choreography in Thuiswinkel.org's Wijnand Jongen declaring that his industry is desperate for a bank-backed cross-border payments offering for online shopping before promptly handing over to EBA Clearing's John Broxis to reveal that's exactly the plan. Jongen even used his iPad mid-session to order his new friend Broxis some flowers as a thank-you - although he did use PayPal.

If anyone was still in doubt about the imminent dominance of the mobile phone in payments, they were quickly corrected by all the panel members, with Mahadevan Balakrishnan, COO of National Payments Corporation of India offering an eye-opening perspective from an emerging giant. Cash may still dominate in India but there is a concerted effort to migrate to cheaper e-payments. In India, particularly rural India, this means using mobile phones and work is well underway on a interbank m-payments service. With 800 million handsets in the country compared to just 300 million bank accounts, this plan could bring literally hundreds of millions of people into the formal banking world.