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Very valid points. As I'd highlighted in my Finextra blog post, a lot of friction described by you persists even in good old desktop ecommerce transactions. And, unfortunately, a lot of people still believe that mobile is just another channel and that account access for making payments shouldn't be made any easier on a mobile than on the desktop!

The Death Of Cash Is At Least 190 Years Away

This had nothing to do with technology or lack of it 20 years ago. JPMC / London Whale proves that this has nothing to do with technology or lack of it even today. Banks - and bankers - make money by enabling a transaction, not blocking it, and no amount of technology is going to change that fundamental business reality.

@ColinK: TY for your response but Cardlytics has secured a patent for exactly such a platform that can be accessed by merchants on a whitelabeled mode to create highly targeted offers and distribute them to a bank's retail consumers. Ditto with Offermatic but in the past tense.

Okay, thanks, the Retail and Logistics / Transport use cases are clear. The Financial Services example is obviously a Card Present transaction. Since CP is anyway authenticated with PIN / Signature, I'm not sure why LBS / CCTV info is required to prove that a transaction has happened or not.

Contrary to my general belief that "zero cash day" is far, far away, "cashless TfL" might happen sooner rather than later since Oyster Card is not cashless for the sake of cashless and offers a few benefits that are not available with cash e.g. auto fare computation. Travelers to new cities struggle to calculate correct fares, especially where fare charts are not displayed in English, which is the case in many parts of Continental Europe. More in What I Liked Best About London Oyster Card on my personal blog.

When they hear about Oyster Card, it's one of the first things they buy after arriving in London. I agree that some more education might be required to spread the Oyster Card message around to travelers who reach London without passing Europe. It would also help if TfL resolved the friction around topup activation as I'd highlighted in my blog post.

For a year or more, there has been a lot of noise about targeted offers based on account transaction history. Wannabe disrupters (e.g. Offermatic) have entered and exited this space during this period. Not sure whether this idea has legs. In any case, in the light of the recent patent secured by Cardlytics in this space, can anyone else even offer a competing solution?

Can you throw more light on "mobile location dilemma" and give a few examples of companies (masking their names is fine) who have prospered and become more agile by not disregarding the "need for real-time location data on all mobile devices" without, hopefully, running afoul of customer privacy concerns. 

With US$ 200B in profits, financial services is the most profitable industry in the latest FORTUNE 500 list. 

According to the FORTUNE magazine, "In the first quarter of 2013, Fannie Mae posted an incredible $58.7 billion in net income. That figure exceeds the highest earnings for an entire year ever reported by (any)Fortune 500 company, ..."

The rising profits of banks in the last two years - a period of unprecedented regulation - suggests that their profits haven't been too sensitive to regulation.

@JamesO'K + 1.

I'd actually go one step further and say that the truly compelling value proposition of a mobile wallet for a consumer lies only in loyalty cards and other nonpayment use cases. 

One side of the company does auditing, the other side provides consulting. One side sells subprime bonds, the other side bets against subprime bonds. One side makes news, the other side reports news. All of them sidestep conflict of interest by saying "Chinese Wall". The guy who invented the term deserves the biggest bonus.