Community

If, as the CEO of A&N Media says, "...our customers ... increasingly consume our content through the mobile device", why can't a simple tap on the product image on the smartphone screen trigger the purchase? Why should the user enter the product code?

QR code, image recognition or the need to enter the product code on the smartphone screen are required ONLY if customers view the shopping supplement in print form but use a mobile device to initiate the purchase - not when they consume the content and initiate the purchase on a mobile device. In other words, these forms of Augmented Reality technologies are required only for omnichannel transactions and not for monochannel ones.

If this is the situation in the UK where many banks - at least both of mine - are open on Saturdays, I don't envy customers in Germany, a few other countries in Continental Europe, and in many parts of the US who have access to their banks only for five days a week. This report doesn't talk of another big problem where customers seeking face-to-face assistance to resolve a particularly knotty problem take the time out to visit a branch when it is open but are directed by bank staff to Phone / Internet Banking kiosks inside the branch.

While the need for flexibility and agility in banking applications is clear, drawing an analogy between Enterprise SOA and iTunes is oversimplifying the situation: In a playlist, each song can be placed anywhere in relation to another and doesn't have to be integrated with the other songs. Unfortunately, business workflows don't work that way - I shudder to think of the consequences for a bank if an an iTunes-inspired solutions architect decided to place the credit check and sanctions screening objects at the end of a fund transfer transaction and didn't think it necessary to integrate either of them with the payment release object. IMO, it is due to the complexities of interdependence and integration that, let alone SOA, even hub-and-spoke integration architecture has barely gained traction in banking landscapes, with hundreds of point-to-point interfaces still reigning supreme.

Biometrics in the mid-90s? We have been seeing biometric ID projects limping along (e.g. Aadhar, India) or failing altogether (UK?) several years later. Maybe the earlier proposal in South Africa failed to take off because biometrics ID was not robust enough at the time? (Some may say that it still is not robust enough even today, but that's another topic.)

Since Visa stands to lose interchange revenues as a result of this move, can't help feeling that it's going ahead with it only to stave off competition for the European launch of SQUARE, in which its has invested. 

On another note, as long as nonbank mobile payment vendors use existing banking rails, they'd always be dependent upon banks and card networks for their very existence. This is a far cry from naive expectations that they'd disintermediate banks.

While it might cost more to produce currency notes, it costs much less for merchants to accept cash as compared to debit cards or credit cards or any other form of ePayments.

Given that all cross-border payments routed via banks have to go through sanctions screening, it is evident that ePayments are not free of money laundering and other nefarious activities.

Lastly, going by this Finextra article and the accompanying comments, electronic money technologies are far from being robust enough to handle high transaction volumes. 

In short, governments are better off continuing to find ways to extend the lives of physical currency - with or without polymer.

Mutual funds pay brokerage to stockbrokers when they buy shares on your behalf. Traditional stockbrokers charge brokerage on an ad valorem basis. Hence, it should follow that the entry load charged by your mutual fund when you put money in should be a percentage of the asset value. If and when "flat fee" stockbrokers enter the mainstream and overtake traditional brokers, your wish for fixed entry load should be fulfilled.

With its candid - and, IMO, very true - comment about PayPal, SQUARE implies that it cares for its customers. I hope it lives up to this claim by refraining from putting arbitrary freezes on merchant accounts.

@BRC: Now that your bluff about PayPal being cheaper than credit / debit cards has been called by @NickC and others, are you still planning to go ahead with PayPal? If you do, hope you enjoy yourselves until you find your account frozen arbitrarily, you discover a new meaning of the term "bad customer service" and you can't find any regulator to whom you can complain.

Kudos to this move. Hopefully, it frees some bandwidth within the Payments Council to start focusing on how to make e-payments more frictionless for payers and payees instead of trying to ram them down the public's throats just because they're cheaper for banks. A true sign of Payments Council's value-add would be when consumers reduce the use of checks by themselves because they have safer and more convenient alternative payment methods. With Barclays PingIt and similar products, that day is not far away.