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@LaurenceL: TY for your reply. When Apple Pay had put Banks Squarely At The Center Of Mobile Payments, I'd thought the move heralded the beginnings of the required cultural change - from both Apple and banks. However, when I'm seeing each side trying to blame the other in the recent Apple Pay Fraud, I'm beginning to wonder if I was over optimistic. To play a little loose with Bill Gates's famous quote, we overestimate the extent of cultural change in, hmmm, 10 or should it be 100 years and underestimate the extent of cultural change in, hmmm, 100 years or should it be 1000 years?

Good move with a clear benefit. Hope Alibaba's investee company in India, PayTM, follows suit. Although I'd be happier if the mobile wallet offered at least the 4-6% bank account interest that I forego by moving my money from my bank account to the PayTM wallet.

For ages, NetBanking websites have been letting users download current account statements. I remember Kublax was one PFM that used these statements as input. However, as I'd highlighted at the time, static downloads don't cut it when deals and offers keep changing all the time. I remember seeing current account comparison tools on a few comparison websites over 5 years ago. Cardlytics and BillShrink / TruAxis are only two names I readily recall of companies that link to current and card account transaction histories to do exactly what the government's API approach seeks to do.

Not sure who is going thru' a time warp here:)

@MarkH:

It's good you brought this up because point #1, 2 and 4 from your list match retailers' words and actions more than my personal opinion:  

1. Even retailers in the highly competitive travel industry never seem to miss an opportunity to bump up prices whenever they think they can get away with it e.g. (a) From personal experience and according to this FORTUNE article, OTAs regularly bump up ticket prices when customers revisit their ads by, say, clicking on retargeted ads. (b) When Australia removed its no-surcharge rule for card acceptance, QANTAS charged 7.5% surcharge even though its card processing cost was only 2.5%.
2. I remember a retailer crying hoarse that interchange fees even exceeded its employee healthcare costs. Why make this sensational comparison unless card processing costs played a vital role in pricing and profitability?
3. The Reverse Robin Hood Cross Subsidy I've quoted is all about how retailers don't offer a cash discount. So, I've said exactly the opposite.
4. Now that card processing costs have reduced, why're they suddenly being projected as a not-so-significant cost?

It's clear that it's upto each bank to view who it considers as its rival. In the interest of more clarity re. partnership, would the recent spate of partnerships between banks and Apple for accepting Apple Pay count as successful chanting of your "play well with others" mantra?

If she were alive today, @MarieA would've come under the Silicon Valley buzz and exhorted her poor subjects to have caviar if they couldn't afford bread! So, Caviar may not be such a bad brand name after all:) On a side note, Square is proving to be another one-trick pony. First Square Wallet. Now Square Order. The company hasn't exactly distinguished itself with glory with anything other than its first product, SQUARE mPOS.

It's amazing to see justifications for why retailers are not reducing prices for card payments now because it's not practical to then administer a differential (lower) price for card and (higher) price for cash. This position completely - conveniently? - ignores the historical "Reverse-Robin-Hood-Cross-Subsidy" inherent in cash v. card payments. In this paper, author Steven Semeraro of Thomas Jefferson School of Law suggests that merchants have historically inflated their cash / check prices to cover the cost of credit card acceptance. Truly customer-centric retailers would now use the current interchange reduction to drop prices of goods for *both* cash and card payments, thereby correcting what has been perceived as a historical injustice to cash payers.

@MarkH: 

I'm merely pointing out one course of action from retailers that's consistent with their claims of being customer-centric, not telling them what to do. 

Boku, Zong and other direct carrier billing payments began with the threat to disintermediate card rails but eventually had to embrace the same rails to ensure their own survival (more in Banks Have Nothing To Fear From TELCOs). A US MNO consortium came up with its own payment ISIS eschewing card rails but it has shut down. IMO, there's no other payment rail that provides the reach of card networks at a cost of 2-3%. That's why V/MC is a duopoly, not because of any divine intervention or regulatory edict. If retailers think otherwise, nothing is stopping them from creating their own payment network, as CurrentC is trying to do in USA.

Maybe it's only me but failing to pass on the reduction under the pretext that the customer won't notice it sounds patronizing. If retailers really "put their customers at the heart of everything they do", they'd discount the  £1,000 TV by £4 and spend the balance £1 on advertising the rationale of the price drop.

@TomH: Ha ha. As an IT marketer, I'd have protested at such a streetside solicitation strategy instead of building a new IT solution but, as a bank customer, I'd have made sure to strategically position myself at 3-4 different street corners so that I could pocket £500 at each one of them:).