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@StanleyE: +1. According to this research report on retail payments released by RSR Research a couple of days ago, retailers are thoroughly frustrated with the multiple directions in which the present stakeholders are pulling mobile payments and have reacted by not making any budgetary allocations for any new form of payments as of now. So, plastic is going to be around for a while!

@MichaelK: If, indeed, PayPal has infringed PayOne's patent, it's likely to have known long ago that it was doing so, and would have likely already prepared a defence in anticipation of a potential lawsuit by PayOne in future. On the other hand, this infringement might come as a total shock to Home Depot. Besides, Home Depot is a FORTUNE 500 company with lot more "rep to protect" as against PayPal which is used to listening to irate merchants on a daily basis without getting bothered in the least bit. As a result, it would seem logical that PayOne chose to go after Home Depot rather than PayPal. And, why not, since patent owners are legally permitted to sue the buyer, not just the infringer.

@AlexP: TY for your comment. The first page of Google SERP for "Net1's MVC technology" is full of entries related to Microsoft ASP.NET MVC. Is that what you meant? 

Kudos to Bankinter for showing that Banks Have Nothing To Fear From TELCOs.

Maybe this is what happens when the digerati rubber finally meets the regulatory road. However, I'm a bit sad that this should begin with someone like SQUARE, which never claimed to disintermediate banks from payments. 

Just as friction in online payments is driving shoppers to go back to cash & cheques in India, this Fed article explains how online identity theft is forcing people in the USA to go back to filing their tax returns the old-fashioned way, printing and mailing them. Looks like we're still far from striking the right balance between security and convenience for online transactions. 

Zipcar already uses e-locks opened by mobile apps on cars belonging to its fleet. Although it doesn't follow that people will adopt e-locks for their homes anytime soon, it does expose niches where mobile technologies could find acceptance sooner rather than later. For the record, plastic cards are too broadbased to belong to a niche.

"Stripe will face competition in Europe from Paymill". If Stripe doesn't need the website owner to have a merchant account, then isn't it just another "digital wallet"? In that case, won't it also face competition from the likes of PayPal and Skrill / MoneyBookers?

I'm not saying that ATMs are irreplaceable in a general context, just that cashback via small businesses is no substitute for ATMs. As for maximizing the bang for their ATM buck, banks have been doing that in India for over 10 years. I remember a time in the early 2000s when the ATM of my (German) bank in Frankfurt could dispense cash and do nothing else, not even display the updated account balance. Whereas, during the same era, the ATMs of one of the Top 3 private sector banks in India supported mobile topup and a few more advanced features (yes, they could also display updated account balance). 4-5 years ago, this bank started supporting P2P money transfer from its customers to non-account holders who could withdraw the money from its ATMs by keying in a PIN# - a feature that's just about making an entry in many countries during the last 1-2 years. Coincidentally, I just received an email from this bank today announcing instant FD opening, event ticketing and many more value-added features on its ATMs. I'm convinced that many banks in India are at the forefront of extracting maximum value from their ATM estate. Advising them to do so is preaching to the choir even if it does result in a lively discussion.

The business model for card acceptance - POS rental plus 2-4% MDF / MSC - is almost the same all over the world. For many years now, merchants have been receiving their payments from banks on T+1. Only when a cardholder raises a dispute that a merchant have to show the signed chargeslip as evidence of the transaction. Besides, SQUARE-clones that obviate the need for a POS for accepting card payments have been around in India for over a year now. If small businesses still hesitate to accept credit cards in India, it's either because they still find cash to be the cheapest mode of payment or their customers are indifferent to paying by card or cash or, like their brethren elsewhere in the world, they want to have their cake and eat it too as I'd pointed out here. I hardly hold banks responsible for this situation. Anyway, coming back to the main topic, if banks cut down their ATM count and tell me to go searching around for a small business to pick up cash, I definitely won't like it.

Having used the cashback facility several times in supermarkets in the UK and never found it in India, cash disbursement via businesses won't significantly impact ATM count, let alone disrupt cash management, for the following reasons: (1) It hasn't done so in the UK where it has been around for a long time, probably because average ATM cash withdrawals are much higher than the 25 GBP ceiling placed on cashback (2) Most small businesses in India don't accept cards, so the question of using them to disburse cash when paying by cards doesn't arise in the the first place - in fact, it's funny how many times I've been told by such businesses to visit the nearest ATM, withdraw cash, come back and pay them by cash because they don't accept cards (3) Surely, cashback can be implemented in supermarkets in India but organized retail to which supermarkets belong amounts to less than 10% of total retail volumes in India compared to >70% in the UK, so cash withdrawal via cashback would be a mere drop in the total cash withdrawal ocean handled by ATMs in India.