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Nice post Alex.  Very interesting.  Of course there are difficult convenience vs security issues around what you suggest but I think you're on to something.  Even technology-challenged old gits like myself can't help but notice that exciting things are happening with social media and the web 2.0 generally, and as you say, logging into my online bank (both personal and corporate) is increasingly painful and the whole look and feel of the online banking experience is beginning to look out of date.  In a sense I find this quite reassuring but I agree with you that there should probably be different contexts for activities with very different security requirements such as balance enquiries vs funds transfers.  Interesting ....

Really nice post Jim - packed with useful information!

Keep it coming in 2012!

Nice article Jon.  I agree that the card payments industry has been slow to establish a secure and convenient solution for e-commerce payments.  I think the answer lies in a combination of VbV/SecureCode with Remote Chip Authentication - "Chip and PIN Online" - perhaps made easier with Display Cards.  But whether that will prevail in 10 years time - who knows?

For an interesting discussion about this topic, see http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Chip-PIN-Online-130718.S.57585173?qid=498f66df-f7c8-4e82-b124-93af962082cd&trk=group_search_item_list-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egmp_130718 

I'm certainly not surprised - the law of unintended consequences strikes again - see http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Interchange-fees-law-unintended-consequences-130718.S.79761867?qid=f7b9742d-6d58-47f1-898b-bd3ba61ebb74&trk=group_search_item_list-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egmp_130718 

I totally agree with you Bo.  Let's hope the UK government takes a similar approach. 

Fascinating!  This "e-trust" concept - the idea that banks are uniquely well positioned to deliver digital ID and authentication services on behalf of government or anyone else - has been around for many years.  I wrote a paper on the subject of e-trust for CSFI back in the 1990s then worked on the ECIPS project for the Payments Council a few years later, then did the same for MasterCard, and even approached the UK government a few times during the national ID card years.  In all cases nothing happened.  Which is a great pity, since as Jan-Olaf points out it works perfectly well in Sweden.  It will be interesting to see what happens this time around.

So the law of unintended consequences strikes again and the result of politicians meddling with interchange rates is that consumers end up paying more, exactly as predicted.  It is a bit rich for Dick Durbin, backed by the powerful merchant lobby, to complain about what he himself brought about.

OK Aaron, fair point.  However, you can do something very similar with chip-based loyalty applications on standard contact payment cards.  Vendors like Welcome Realtime have developed co-branded multi-merchant loyalty solutions for several banks in Turkey particular, but quite a few other countries.  These can be quite sophisticated - for example, in addition to allowing instant updating and redemption of loyalty points at the point of sale, the merchant can deliver highly targeted offers or messages.  I'm not sure, but I think the merchant can also deliver offers to the cardholder's PC, before they enter the shop.  Admittedly, a mobile solution would add another dimiension in terms of convenience and mobility, but is that enough to justify all the hype?  The chip-based loyalty applications I refer to have had some local success as far as I know, but they are difficult to build, take a long time to get right, and have hardly set the world on fire yet. 

You make an excellent point Jan-Olof.  The lack of a credible business model is just one of the reasons why I believe mobile NFC payments have been enormously over-hyped and will not take off in a big way for many years, if ever.  Another reason is the lack of an acceptance infrastructure.  Current volumes of contactless payments are tiny, and so merchants have very little incentive to install the contactless readers which are required for mobile NFC payments to work.

The lesson to be learned is quite clear - the US must migrate to EMV chip.