Catch the crooks or stop the fraud?

While I like the convenience of looking up my account balance from my mobile phone, I fear that fraud mitigation will erect so many hoops for me to jump that I might eventually prefer to drop into the branch or ATM instead. In the case of payments, I think the bad guys have already won: Two-factor authentication on a mobile phone was the last straw. I've gone back to ePayments and checks. Therefore, I agree with your prediction around how "a general climate of insecurity around financial technology" can be "very bad news" for NextGen payment methods.

However, given the current state of financial technology, I spot more than one pair of mutually-exclusive-and-collectively-exhaustive attributes among convenience, speed, security, efficiency, service, and ease of use! Not sure if this is an aspirational list at this point or are there examples of any banks that have actually managed to deliver all of this in a single payment solution?

Thank you for your comment. I agree with you: convenience, speed, security, efficiency, service and ease of use are all essential to any mobile payment product. Those are not aspirations either; technology is ready and products are available on the market. What hinders it all is the lack of visibility and understanding of such solutions especially in comparison to those traditional two-factor authentication solutions that are no longer at the forefront of the technology. Few are actually able to really understand and embrace the implications of telecommunications and mobile payment solutions, especially when it requires a detailed understanding of both.