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@JamesCranfield: LOL! Proof that what goes around comes around:) Henceforth, whenever a nonbank claims to destroy a bank, I'll take it to mean destroy the bank's latest logo...

@BillTrueman: Not sure why there should be any doubt in my position: In my above comments and in my cited blog post and in my comments to a few other articles on Finextra, I've questioned the value of EMV in USA (though not in ROW). Let me not go into the reasons again other than to observe that factors like "terminal does all checking of customer" are exactly the source of the problem, not solution, and miss my points about dynamics of USA retail behavior being very different from ROW viz. greater demand / supply of CX, lower tolerance to friction of longer transaction time and risk of EMV card being left behind in the terminal.

Not sure how much of an expert Vinod Khosla is about EMV and NFC but, as an early investor in SQUARE, he seems to know a thing or two about what works in the payments business in USA. He's not alone in believing that EMV is not one of them. Low Fraud/Revenue ratio, far greater demand and supply of CX, unnecessary incremental friction imposed on consumers who can get fraudulent transactions, if and when they occur, reversed with a single telephone call - these are at least three reasons why EMV, at least in its present non-contactless form, has a bleak outlook in USA.

Curious to know if Hammonds approves or rejects such a "trail and error" approach? Because there's more to follow in the same lines viz. "fail fast", etc.!

Glad I'm not the only one who believes that VbV reduces conversion. Without getting into the debate about the similarities / differences between EMV and NFC, I too suspected if EMV was really of much value in USA.

Mitigating Fraud Does Not Pay The Bills

So my prediction of this being another case of being economical with the truth by using "strategic silence" was not off the mark! I've come across many companies like Intelligent Environments and have begun to admire the chutzpah of some of them. When caught out on a similar claim, one of them looked at me like I was totally dumb and told me the equivalent of "Isn't it obvious that only millennials owning banking-ready wearables can bank on a wearable? Why do we need to state it explicitly?". On a side note, I predict that research into vendor marketing trust issues will have to come from their pro-bono budget!

Have you heard the one about "Some people bring happiness wherever they go. And some people bring happiness whenever they go"? No prizes for guessing which category your 10 types belong to:) 

On a more serious note, how many other types are there?

On an even lighter note, 

Oh, I love this one - it reeks of the "Strategic Silence" method of lying with big data.

How To Lie With Big Data

Going by the example I quoted there, the following is closer to reality: 

"Almost half of UK 18-30-year olds who own a banking-ready wearable device have banked on a wearable device."

But how much buzz will such a clumsy statement generate?

This is a great move to "protect your existing investment in ATMs", "get more bang for your existing ATM buck" and all that. But I'm not sure how it assuages fear of mobile payments, especially when it only addresses the provisioning phase of it. This solution can give me the assurance that only *I* can add *my* card to *my* mobile wallet issued by a user of this solution but how does that help me when there are so many other mobile wallets around that don't use this solution and this solution can't, for example, prevent someone else from provisioning my card on *their* Apple Pay, which is the source of Apple Pay Provisioning Fraud?

Good question!

Sam Charbonneau @BMPayments

It's pretty sad how slow #EMV transactions are. When the lost time outweighs cost of fraud...how do they expect major retailers to react?