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@AlexP:

Steve Jobs was named as the Best CEO of the Century, credited for disrupting not one or two but three different industries. Therefore, Apple is perhaps an outlier that can't be treated as representative of the whole world of business.

While a single player may open up a whole new industry, that doesn't automatically guarantee success for every player that enters that industry. Banks have been making huge profits in the credit card industry but SQUARE makes a whopping loss.

The converse is also true: For every Blockbuster that failed in brick-and-mortar, there's a Warby Parker that began as a pure play online player but has now decided to open physical stores.

Am I missing the “Sponsored by Facebook” line somewhere? In Why Banks Can't Transform Legacy Applications - Part 2, I’d referred to flawed messaging used to hype the threat to the banking industry from technology. For more reason than one, this post is an example of such messaging:  

FB launched FB Credits with much fanfare a few years ago and shuttered it after a year or so. 

Even when it's encumbered by legacy infrastructure, financial services is the most profitable sector in FORTUNE 500. On the other hand, Amazon, Square, Twitter and other Internet companies are not exactly known for profits.

It's no secret that banks have been making money forever in the credit card business despite their legacy infrastructure. However, with all its spanking new technology, a nonbank darling like SQUARE has managed to bleed so badly in this business that it has to fight off rumors of having to sell itself off to survive.

There’s no law against crystalball gazing but it's another matter when predictions sound like fantasy when set against the backdrop of the woeful performance of Facebook - and other wannnabe bank killers - whenever they’ve dabbled with financial services in the past.

The near-universal love affair with Apple technology will surely trigger initial trials even from businesses and consumers who have hitherto been apathetic to other LBS alternatives out in the market. Eventually, however, the critical success factors for these location-based initiatives will shift from technology to things like content of "tailored information", location and time of alert. In a retail industry pilot, we're seeing much higher conversions for the targeted offer "20% discount off on coffee" sent to someone just outside the coffee store (rather than inside) at 3PM (rather than 8PM). 

When IBM sold off its PC business, it didn't mean that PCs were dead. The fact that Lenovo took it over and has turned it into a profit machine doesn't mean that PCs are thriving. IMO, success or failure of an individual brand (iPod, Amazon) does not reflect the fundamental validity or otherwise of the generic product (MP3 player) or business model (online). It means largely that the said company did a great or lousy job.

I thought you'd unequivocally written off swipe when you'd written, "So does this mean there's life left in cards? Not a chance." Many years later, your stats seem to imply that contactless accounts for merely 1% of card transactions. To me, that suggests that swipe is very much alive and kicking. 

If the payment itself is irrelevant, the genre "mobile payment" should become defunct as well - nothing invisible deserves a whole product category named after it. The spotlight should shift to "mobile loyalty", "mobile engagement", etc., if those are the only things that really matter. The same way it's called "smart meter", not "smart electricity". Starbucks and Uber are invalid lighthouses for mobile payments. 

First CoOp-Infosys, now Brewin-Figaro. Unless tech vendors do something fast, the value proposition of their legacy transformation offerings will erode rapidly.

6 Reasons Why Banks Can't Transform Legacy Applications  

I'm sorry but it appears that there's a bigtime mixup between mPOS and mWallet here. These are two different products, with entirely different pains, target audiences and value propositions.

I partially agree with your views about mWallet and have written about the subject on several occasions myself e.g. Mobile Wallets: Fix What's Broken - And It Ain't Payments. However, mPOS, which is the topic of this post, solves a pain I've already mentioned. SQUARE *has not* shut down this product. 

SQUARE has shut down only its Wallet product. 

Agreed. Your figure of 18 characters resonates totally with my personal experience. As I'd highlighted in my post titled How Usability Can Increase Adoption of Internet Banking on my personal blog, I wanted to enter "MCS MERIDIAN CLIENT ACCOUNT" in the payee field of the payment instruction but my bank - a Top 5 UK Bank - would only permit a narration as long as "MCS MERIDIAN CLTAC" which is exactly 18 characters. However, another Top 10 UK Bank was able to accept my full narration. Maybe some banks did implement a workaround several - if not 20 - years ago, considering my post is from 2008.

I think it's a generational thing. My GenY nephew hits a button on his Webmail, selects a file from his hard disk, stares at the screen for the next 5-10 minutes that it takes to finish attaching a large file to his email, before he can hit the Send button. Having been initiated into email via a desktop client like Outlook - where I simply copy-paste the file and hit the Send button and move on - I find the Webmail procedure to be excruciatingly painful.

In the same way, my nephew's set will find it perfectly natural to fire up a mobile wallet app, wait for several seconds / minutes to locate the store, all for the pleasure of using a mobile phone to make a payment unlike me who'd find it much easier to whip out my wallet and use my plastic card.

Personally, SQUARE Wallet should've targeted the 18-25 years segment. It failed because its promo videos featured people who looked to be in their late 20s or early 30s.

Talking about Coin, an overwhelming majority of readers who took the survey on my blog post said they'd pay not more than US$ 10 for it. If the company sticks to its $50 / 100 price, I agree that Coin's going to be DOA.

It's interesting to know that something can languish for almost 40 years because people didn't know where to start. Many of the technologies underpinning these five maturity levels have been around for 10-20-30-40 years, if not more. They're suddenly going to make a big difference now because? Well, they're not going to make any difference because paperless is a fundamentally flawed concept, as I'd highlighted in my post How Suitable Is Email For Delivering Bills And Statements?

According to Michael Lewis' Flash Boys, Goldman Sachs regularly took over open source software, made changes to it but failed to submit it back to the open source community. Now, we hear this about RBS. Even counting only the software that they pay for, banking is one of the biggest consumers for IT. If we add the rest of the software they use, they might easily top the list.