Should banks still handle payments?

Well thank you Tom and welcome to a growing band of people who believe, as we do here at Chasm Management Limited, that the banks, or indeed financial institutions in general, need to do something fundamental in the services and offerings to bring the shine back. Banks are like any other business with respect to the fact that they rely on an underlying IT service. The problem here is that the banks have so confused the two that they have dragged the IT portion of the business down to the level of the rest of the business. No one denies that banks should be prudent and small c conservative in embracing change. But there are many instances of quasi-independent IT making sound changes fast on their behalf and operating them reliably thereafter. Account switching and mobile payments spring to mind. What if someone came up with a workable model that inserted an IT layer between the customers and the banks IT service and in this layer provided secure access, PCI-DSS filtering, cross product navigation and the rest?? Wait, they have, and Chasm Management will be publishing the top layers of this model this month.