Walled gardens or windmills?

Is there a chance that Apple will push the use of iTunes as a payment mechanism beyond its own virtual store (imagine shopping on Amazon and paying using your iTunes account)? Will Google look to launch Google Checkout in the physical world, in the same way as PayPal have announced (by way of VeriFone)? Is there any substance behind the threat that Facebook Credits will impact physical currency?

If any of this comes to fruition, consumers are just as likely to want to use these methods beyond just payments – after all, pre-pay credit cards are now being used as a substitute for remittances.

What, if anything, should banks be doing?

I know of a number of banks that are actively looking at their own “private” P2P systems that they could launch as a direct response to some of these threats - but I personally don't believe this is the correct approach.

There is an old Chinese proverb, along the lines of “When the wind of change blows, some build walls, others build windmills”. Is the building of yet another “money network” the banking equivalent of building a wall?

Perhaps the banks should be looking at how they can integrate in to and leverage these different networks, rather than building their own walled gardens. I can already choose to make a payment from my bank utilising domestic clearing, faster payments or SWIFT - selected based upon either destination or speed versus cost. Why not utilise these other networks in the same way - let me specify the destination (which might be a bank account, or it could be an e-mail address routed via PayPal, or an East African mobile telephone number routed via M-Pesa) and the bank will calculate the routing and give me the price to remit.

Becoming "network agnostic" and offering channel transparency (i.e. being able to make and manage this payment over any connected channel) might mean that a bank retains customer funds on deposit for as long as possible, affording other revenue opportunities.