Community

Thirded, if such a word exists. I'm sure this is a faithful coverage of what happened during the event but, if this is a display of state-of-art in ATM, many banks in India and Asia Pacific are miles ahead. Event and railway ticket booking, accountless-and-cardless collection of domestic and cross-border remittances, donations to temples, prepaid mobile topup, dispensing cash in multiple currencies in border towns - banks in this region have been doing all this and more for almost 10 years. And, to answer the second Finextra Member's question, the ATMs of one of my banks has a "My Favorite Transaction" feature, which cuts down processing time by 60%.

It's funny how consumers can keep a track of how much they spend only by using cash whereas banks are expecting to find out the same thing by making consumers use mobile wallets! 

Any news on how banks plan to make up the £200M loss of revenues caused by this change?

You can have your mobile wallet and lose it too:

The Clear And Present Danger With NFC Payments

There's no such risk with a physical wallet.

I was almost sold on Email OTP until I saw the analogy with eStatements: How Suitable Is Email For Delivering Bills And Statements? Do you have to supply a password before seeing the OTP?

Agreed but I'd anyday accept the predictable "pain in the pocket" over the unpredictability of the smartphone / mobile OTP alternative. But, that's only me. As I said, "Only time will tell whether Mobile OTP will stimulate online payments or sound its death knell."  

Not having to take it out of a wallet is a major appeal of contactless cards for me. Take that away, it almost turns into a damp squib. That said, chip-and-PIN involves the huge friction caused by password, so the difference between contactless-taken-out-of-wallet and chip-and-PIN is more than just the few extra seconds. Until something comes along in between, I'm happy with only one contactless-card-that-stays-inside-my-wallet.

@RiteshA: TY for bringing up the alternative of Email OTP. While I've no personal experience with it - none of the close to a dozen-odd banks I'm exposed to uses it - Email OTP seems more convenient than Mobile OTP. However, Email OTP is "in band" and, for that reason, could be viewed by security purists as less secure than Mobile OTP, which is "out of band". 

@AlexP: TY for your comment. The same bank has been using hardware tokens for supplying OTPs for a different usage scenario (NetBanking) for several years. In 8+ years, I've never had a problem with it (knock on wood!). I guess it has moved away from a hardware alternative for online credit card usage due to a myopic focus on cost reduction. 

Wikipedia and other Top 3 Google SERP results call "BitCoin" a currency. No one calls oranges currency, besides they're perishable and anyway don't meet the durability prerequisite for a currency. M-PESA is clearly not a currency, it's a method of payment that is used to transfer the regular local currency (KES, Kenyan Shilling). That said, that there could be a rigorous definition of the term "currency" that BitCoin doesn't fulfill, but that doesn't reduce its appeal in the limited context I've described.

Loyalty to old business processes is not unique to BFSI. However, vendors serving manufacturing, retail and most other industries - e.g. ERP - are lot more successful in persuading their customers to replace old practices than fintech vendors are, with their BFSI customers. Maybe BFSI is very different from other industries but, in my exposure to other industries, I suspect the problem lies more with the deficit in consulting skills in the fintech vendor community than anything else.