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One of the largest cyberfrauds in the USA - the so-called Onwuhara HELOC Fraud - was apparently solved after a massive investigation that was launched when the fraudsters had unwittingly plied their trade on one Robert "Duke" Short, a former U.S. Treasury agent and Treasury Department's national chief of investigations. Reporting on the story, this FORTUNE article commented, "He was ... the wrong man to hit".

Hopefully, these skimmers might similarly realize that Jenny Durkan "was the wrong woman to hit".

It's so ironical that these fraudsters steal someone's identity but don't really "get" who that somone is!

Some people might push through a transaction on a mobile channel at first pass to avoid the pain of repeating it, whereas others might abandon the channel altogether due to the friction it poses. For me, VbV and other forms of 2FA were the last straw in my use of mobile payments: I've gone back to Internet-based ePayments or checks. IMHO, it makes sense to compare conversions and shopping cart abandonments only among channels having similar transaction volumes. With m-commerce accounting for less than 1% of retail sales (according to figures for the US market, all forms of remote channels contribute to less than 8% of revenues), that scenario is a long way off.  

While I like the convenience of looking up my account balance from my mobile phone, I fear that fraud mitigation will erect so many hoops for me to jump that I might eventually prefer to drop into the branch or ATM instead. In the case of payments, I think the bad guys have already won: Two-factor authentication on a mobile phone was the last straw. I've gone back to ePayments and checks. Therefore, I agree with your prediction around how "a general climate of insecurity around financial technology" can be "very bad news" for NextGen payment methods.

However, given the current state of financial technology, I spot more than one pair of mutually-exclusive-and-collectively-exhaustive attributes among convenience, speed, security, efficiency, service, and ease of use! Not sure if this is an aspirational list at this point or are there examples of any banks that have actually managed to deliver all of this in a single payment solution?

@Bo H:

A good portion of cross-border B2B payments happens via TARGET2, which uses ISO20022 as well. You can correct me if I am wrong, but I think the SCT alignment benefit you've highlighted is equally applicable for TARGET2 messages. This provides one more reason why e-invoicing should follow ISO20022 standards.  

An analyst report on Retail Currency Management technology preempted skepticism for the very concept of currency by pointing out that checks were supposed to replace cash decades ago.

As the recent reversal in the case of 'chequeless' in UK illustrates, cashless, chequeless and many other 'less'es can happen a lot faster if only the drivers changed from 'cut costs for payees' to 'add convenience, security, etc. for payors." Where service providers can pass on costs to their customers, they have a perverse incentive to let costs remain high and the status quo is unlikely to change for a very long time. On the other hand, email and a few other disruptive technologies have shown that it is possible to bring about massive shifts in consumer behavior in less than 10 years by being oriented at the consumer. Judged by this yardstick, contactless cards probably have the best shot at the 'currency killer' title. 

@Mike K:

Like you, I've worked in a professional capacity to provide ePayment solutions. However, when it comes to my personal life, I haven't found a more convenient alternative to checks because of the high degree of friction involved in most current forms of ePayments. I've written about them on my personal blog on several occasions. Suffice to say that they revolve around inadequate field lengths for narrations, anxiety in entering the beneficiary account number, and so on. 

Props for hitting the nail on the head when you say "The reason the UK initiative failed is because no adequate alternatives were developed." I've voiced a similar view on Finextra and believe that there's no point in blaming the common man for choosing checks as the path of least resistance. I share your opinion that solution has to come from banks and payment solutions providers and not the government. 

Great post, that too in an off-the-beaten-track area of sales. We come across a lot of companies who mistakenly believe that product knowledge and / or domain expertise are the most important prerequisites for a salesperson only to realize a few months / years later that selling involves, well, selling, a skill that goes far beyond product or domain. 

I have heard about a top global bank that asked exactly the same four questions and spent tens of millions to implement a multicurrency global liquidity management system to find the answers. Midway through the implementation, a combination of challenges related to data quality, systems integration and change management set against the backdrop of a regulatory deadline reduced the scope of a project to a Euro liquidity management system. At the end of the project, liquidity management went largely out the window and the bank was left with a payment processing system for a new payment type.

Not to single out any bank or technology vendor, but noble goals don't always translate into concrete results, which is probably why Excel still reigns supreme. This is not unique to TMS for, according to a saying I've heard, "70% of FORTUNE 500 companies use ERP but 90% of them submit board reports in Excel!" It's not very surprising that so many solutions pitched as "overcoming the tyranny of Excel" don't secure budgets from the C-Suite who are used to seeing fancy reports and charts - not tyranny - in Excel!

Kudos to these two banks for taking the early lead on using mobile and social media to jump on to the 'omnichannel banking' bandwagon. This move should resonate well with the preferences of an overwhelming majority of customers to research banking products online but buy them at branches.  

Source: Survey across Australia, Canada, USA and many other countries done by CEB Financial Services Customer Experience Survey, as cited in this TowerGroup report. 

Why blame politicians for the sins committed by banks and solution providers in designing systems with so much friction that many of their ePayment products are rejected by mainstream banking customers? Not just in the UK, the recent decision by INGDirect USA makes this point eloquently: Although its customers have chosen to bank with a direct bank that has no branches, they clearly want the convenience of making payments by paper checks instead of jumping several hoops to put through an electronic payment.

Amazon didn't cause a BORDERS moment by getting bookstores banned. Nor did iPhone disrupt the mobile phone market by lobbying with some industry assocation to turn against the BlackBerries or Nokias of the world. Similarly, ePayment providers need to realize that they can change the status quo only through the strengths of their products and UX and not via an artificially-guaranteed cheque-less market.

Ironically, the recent decision to continue with cheques in the UK might actually boost ePayments: Finally, banks and solution providers might start designing products and devising go to market strategies in such a way that customers voluntarily choose ePayments over cheques.