HSBC and Abbey are not lemmings on chip and pin

I'm surprised that HSBC is lukewarm about "Chip & PIN at Home".  This approach has been successfully adopted by several major European banks such as ABN AMRO, Rabobank, KBC and Nordea, to name but a few, and has now been launched by RBS and Barclaycard in the UK, supported by APACS.  Contrary to the previous blogs it is not vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks provided transaction data signing is used - typically the user enters the beneficiary's account number on the reader as well as the PIN which means fraudulent attempts to transfer money to another account are foiled.  Chip & PIN at Home is highly secure, cost-effective, familiar, and works across any remote channel (ie phone as well as internet; remote payments as well as remote banking).  By contrast HSBC's phone-based approach sounds highly expensive, inconvenient, applicable only to e-banking, and unproven.