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@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.

As long as the fiber coins are used to buy things from the same shop that issued them in the first place, there's perhaps nothing illegal about them. Therefore, the risk of any court issuing a "cease-and-desist" order are minimal. Besides, businesses like canteens have been issuing paper chits as substitutes for change for a long time in India. Furthermore, with commission on "change transactions" - 100 x 1 coins in return for 1 x 100 banknote - reportedly touching 18% (according to a parking lot attendant I happened to speak with recently), the change problem is only going to get more acute going forward. I doubt if Indian courts, who are struggling with a huge backlog of lawsuits, will be too bothered with such a typically-Indian solution to such a typically-Indian problem. Personally, I circumvent this problem by using credit cards as far as possible. Ever since I started doing this, I've been pleasantly surprised to note that, even for most categories of products of everyday purchase (e.g. fuel, groceries, cigarettes, etc.), there are several stores who do accept credit cards nowadays.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm unable to reconcile the first point in the second list with the first point in the first list. If 60% of B2B payers accept direct debits, how come 70% of payments are made by checks?

For many suppliers - me included! - collecting the payment in time is a major task in itself. Most incoming payments don't contain any remittance information, let alone in an industry-standard format. The second point in the second list shouldn't be a major surprise for many such suppliers.

Until e-payments permit detailed narration required for reconcilation - rather than just a cryptic message that can be accommodated in the limited lengths of their reference field - we can expect the usage of checks to continue to dominate B2B payments.

Merchant adoption of mobile payments faces another challenge: Since they won't use plastic, even in-store mobile payments will reportedly be treated as Card Not Present transactions, attracting the higher interchange fees due on them.

Fully agree. Without saying it in as many words, you've made the oft-missed point that a mobile banking app installed on a registered mobile phone automatically achieves one-factor authentication. It's really questionable if the app must also demand a password and thereby achieve two-factor authentication for something simple like account balance inquiry. Traditionally, banks have seen mobile banking as an adjunct of Internet Banking - many banks I know activate mobile banking only to those customers who are registered for Internet Banking. From the long list of banks you have cited who are launching instant balance inquiry on mobile phones, I am heartened to note that the traditional thinking is making way for a more sensible treatment of mobile as an independent, powerful channel in itself. 

While banks are at it, I hope they throw personalized offers and a few more things outside the walled garden. They should realize that Tap Buy, Times intARact and a few other nonbanking offer providers actually use push notification technology to proactively push out offers on the smartphones of registered users who don't even have to fire up the app, let alone enter a password.

Although no one "would say no", only bankers seem to be "given the chance". Banking is the only industry I can think of where (a) the employer realizes returns from a deal over several years but the employee receives the bonus on the total deal size on the same year that the deal was struck (b) gains are personalized but losses are socialized. Greed / avarice are as much part of human fraily as the tendency to not say no given the chance, so I'm not sure if passing laws against greed / avarice would work. A more practical solution would be to pay out bonuses to bankers strictly in lockstep with the actual inflow of projected deal benefits.

I agree that banks have access to a lot of customer spend data. Banks like BankAm have already announced concrete initiatives to use suitable technology to help convert that data into insights and drive upselling and cross-selling. At this point, it would help other banks decide whether to follow suit or not if vendors of such technology can share concrete findings from such initiatives.

Cash or Currency involve physical exchange. Money is a legal tender of exchange and is involved even when the exchange happens electronically e.g. Money Transfer Operator, Fund Transfer, etc. 

Far as I know, M3 is updated at country / city level when currency notes move from one country / city to another.

The problem with "checking account", "mobile payments" and other popular terms is that, well, they're popular! Even if they might appear ill-defined in hindsight, they're so well entrenched in the popular lexicon that individual service providers might find it unviable to correct their definitions. Even the mighty Facebook had to reconcile itself with this harsh reality recently: Explaining its rationale for shutting down "Facebook Credits", Facebook admitted that people have such deeply entrenched notions about the term "money" that it wasn't worth its while to try and educate them about an alternative medium of exchange called "Facebook Credits".

Open-loop mobile payments like Google Wallet and M-PESA use banking or MNO rails, both of which already enjoy reasonable amount of trust of the average consumer. If we take closed-loop mobile payments, only consumers who trust the merchant's basic product (e.g. Coffee) will even visit the store and try out the merchant's mobile payment product (e.g. Starbucks Prepaid Card). Trust is a given under this situation. Against this backdrop, unless "trust" and "security" are used interchangeably, I don't know what more trust mobile payments need to cultivate with consumers. (I accept that trust is a far more important issue in a merchant's acceptance of a certain payment method versus another e.g. If PayPal keeps freezing a merchant's account for no apparent reason, I expect that merchant to lose trust in PayPal and refuse to sign up for accepting its PayPal Here mobile payment product. But, I'm unable to link this context of trust with secure element or secure identity). 

Even leaving aside "soft" issues like perception, consumer behavior and communication strategy, the fundamental point is this: Any given entity can have different representations under different frames of references. This doesn't make one of those representations wrong. A mobile payment does result in increments and decrements of a certain number at the database level but it undeniably involves transfer of what everybody accepts as money / consideration in the real-world level. I see a place for both representations of mobile payments, depending on the frame of reference used in a given context. As a matter of fact, even banknotes are numbers in a central bank's money supply ("M3") databases. If I were to stuff some currency notes in an envelope and send it to someone, there's a decrement in one M3 database and an increment in another M3 database. This doesn't take away the fact that banknotes are a form of money.