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Talking about competition in the UK, Kublax is another personalized personal finance management service already in existence, though seemingly not very well known.

Services like Wonga - and the eBay-owned BillMeLater - testify to the availability and successful adoption of realtime credit decisioning applications. Of course, it's a another matter whether one should seek instant gratification on a matter like taking a loan that can prove to be as costly as Wonga's.  

SQUARE mitigates the risk of loss of sale when the seller is unable to accept a credit card. It is assumed that the buyer anyway trusts the seller enough to buy. SQUARE merely facilitates the transaction by enabling the seller to accept a credit card, which wouldn't be possible without SQUARE.  So, I'm not sure if the issue of buyer-seller trust comes in the way of adoption of SQUARE. Only time will tell if the size of the market that SQUARE seeks to facilitate in this manner is big or small.

As regards availability, SQUARE might have launched only on the iPhone but its card reader device works on the audio jack which is available on Nokia, Samsung and most other handsets - even of the non smartphone variety. I think the SQUARE promotional material makes a specific mention of this.

Thanks for all the good work. Season's greetings and best wishes for a happy new year!

Banks are looking for a quick and low-risk way to adopt Web 2.0 technologies to retain existing customers, add new customers and acquire new revenue streams. Finacle Advizor is an interesting packaged offering to address this need provided it can be bolted on to Temenos, FLEXCUBE, FiServ, et al, and not be restricted to its own core banking product.

Future Generali's phone-based renewal and premium payment is not the first. I know at least one other insurer - Bajaj Allianz - offering this for sometime now. I happened to renew my auto insurance with Bajaj Allianz over the phone two months ago.

As a technology partner to various banks and having participated in many steering committees of transaction banking businesses of leading banks, I'm inclined to agree with Geoff's views.

There's a whole lot of 'product' mindset in banks, which is very good to keep the 'lights on', but creating new revenue streams from transaction banking data calls for a 'solution' mindset.  

I have come across a relationship manager at a Top 5 UK bank sensing strong potental to earn incremental revenues by offering hourly account balance insight to their corporate clients. But, they have been shooed away by their operations and IT citing that too much change would be required to their existing systems to fulfill this need. Can't say I blame the ops or IT departments because their first priority is to keep the shop running smoothly, so it's not hard to understand their "why fix it if ain't broken" attitudes.

I think this impasse can be broken by technology vendors partnering with transaction banking businesses of banks in order to create point solutions and taking them to market jointly.

Similar Generation Y Payment Providers like BOKU and ZONG, to name a few, face stiff barriers to widespread adoption of their payment methods because mobile network operators retain as much as 40-50% of the transaction value as their fees. It would be interesting to learn GoPayForIt's plans to tackle this problem.