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@Anonymous of 03/03/2011 12:15:46:

Answer: Sorry, I meant Matt White.

PS: I'll take this as another example of how the newly-turned "anonymous" Finextra "specialized walled garden" community can foster expert and prolific Q&A! 

@Mark:

Am glad to hear that Finextra intends to stay focused on an industry and be selective about its membership profile. It struck me that, by adding "anonymity" to its intrinsic nature of being a "specialized walled-garden", Finextra may not only end up enriching its blogging platform but also be in a position to germinate a value-added Q&A property for the fintech industry - somewhat akin to Quora for the startup / VC industry.

Having just watched a Gartner+SmartStream Sponsored Video webcast on Finextra about Intraday Liquidity Management, the first question that came to my mind was "Can treasurers in the Finextra community share their experiences of live implementations of intraday liquidity management technology solutions?"

The specialized nature of the Finextra community will guarantee quality of responses, and the new ability to submit them anonymously will ensure that there are enough responses to the make the Q&A thread interesting. 

Is this the first step towards eventually opening up Finextra to unregistered comments? Something that many blogs do probably to add SEO juice and gain a few positions on search engine results.  

@John: Although I'd commented on a different Finextra item today seeking more details of the withdrawal process, I hadn't dreamt of such a diabolical scenario as you've outlined. Good catch! But hope it doesn't come true. 

While the article doesn't explicitly say so, I'm assuming it refers to cross-border money transfer, since domestic transfers via credit cards have been in vogue in many countries (including India) for a few years now.

It would be instructive to get more details around the "last mile" and security of the transaction: Can the receiver opt to keep the received funds in his/her credit card account forever and offset it against other spends on the card? If not, how does s/he transfer it to their bank accounts? Hopefully the receiver needs to only divulge his/her credit card number to the sender, for few will be comfortable disclosing Name on Card, Expiry Date and CVV?

Without debating about the merits and demerits of EMV - and I believe there are plenty of them - I wanted to touch upon the subject of business case for the typical American merchant who seems to be getting pushed in several directions to deploy Contactless, EMV and several other new technologies. Maybe there could a quid pro quo built into Durbin Amendment and other proposed regulation to reduce interchange fees in return for EMV / NFC deployment?

Last year, I received my IT refund from HMRC by electronic transfer to my bank account. It reached me by BACS and not FPS, for which I've to blame my bank for not having enabled FPS-reachability on the said sort code. At the time, I'd blogged about how we sometimes rush to blame the government for errors of omission and commission caused by others. 

At the same time, I think HMRC still uses only snail-mail for all communications involving Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Does appear a bit uncool under the circumstances.

Since the subject of promoting FPS has cropped up, I've contributed a few comments to another Finextra post in this subject and, coming to think of it, I'm not sure if the man on the street really needs any more promotion or education about backbone payment methods.

IMO, the best service that banks can provide to their customers is to make the whole backbone transparent: Simply ask the payer to provide the amount, and the beneficiary bank details, then use an automated engine to work out the various options available for putting through the given payment at the given time based on reachability, hours of operations, and any other considerations viz. 3 days at GBP 0 (BACS) OR 2 hours at GBP 5 (FPS) OR Instantly at GBP 35 (CHAPS). The customer should be asked to simply choose the option that best meets her timescale / cost considerations. The present method of asking the customer to select a payment method, then add payee valid only for that payment method, select another payment method, add the same payee again, etc. etc. is fraught with too much friction, and I wonder if any amount of promotion / education will bolster adoption of FPS (or ePayments in general) significantly. 

By making a comparison with checks, NRF raises a valid point in questioning why debit card payments should attract 1-2% transaction processing fees. 

However, I wonder how NRF plans to respond to the 30-40% fees that merchants have to cough up in the case of "GenY Mobile" Payments (ex: Boku, Zong) and "Walled Garden" Payments (ex: Apple AppStore). 

@SandraG: While it's impossible to find a solution to this problem via these comments, let me simply point out that there's a lesson to be learned from the drivers of the migration from checks to epayments in Europe. Having personally experienced the transition from DM to Euro in Germany, I can say that B2B ePayments were the norm in Europe well before the launch of Euro. The drivers lie not in the cost of checks versus epayments - as a matter of fact, the migration happened despite checks being free and epayments attracting fees in most parts of Europe - but in the potential of epayments to deliver efficiency gains in the end-to-end payments process. 

@Sandra G: This age-old saying has frustrated many a technology provider over the years, including me! But, there's an approach to counter the apathy resulting from it, and it is: "What if you don't know it's broken?" The technology provider needs to invest far more in creating an alternative packaging of their offering in order to carry off this counter approach. But, from personal experience, I can confirm that it has worked on many occasions, especially when the alternative packaging can be made to resonate well with industry hot topics and business pain areas.