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Actually, what has happened here is that the employee has been ripped off. There's a reason why the company hasn't just paid them in cash. Remember the old US song "I sold my soul to the company store", which was about workers grievances at being paid in tokens that were only redeemable at the outrageously expensive company store. Same thing in China but more subtle. I'll go further to suggest that the issuer is giving kickbacks to the company to facilitate the whole farcical programme.

The substance behind the hype...

"360,000 downloads of Lloyds TSB's app"... BUT they have 16 million customers, so only 2% of customers have the app and 98% don't.

"14% of US customers us mobile devices for banking" BUT this means that 86% don't.

"Paypal mobile retail sales will hit the £2.5 billion mark by 2016" BUT you missed the context from the original research that this is going to be 5.9% of retail sales... by 2016. Or 94% of sales will NOT be by mobile by 2016.

"Starbucks processed more than 20 million mobile payments this year" - BUT Starbucks sell approx. 4 BILLION cups of coffee a year... so, despite the push, 99.5% of Starbuck's payments are non-mobile.

Spare the technological hagiography. What Apple are good at is taking existing technologies and dumbing them down so that the average joe can understand them, then selling them on to Joe at a brand premium... at least until the rest of the market catches up.

What this tells us in Banking is to keep it simple and make it work.

It is also interesting that Apple saw the need to set up their own branches (Apple stores) to sell their products. Shows that the Branch is very important and people still like to do things face to face.

I also tried this, but the card only works if you hold the phone the right way round. The internals of the phone (most likely the battery) block the signal otherwise.

I try to ensure that my PCs are all either Linux or dual boot Linux. I then make sure that all internet related activity done by the family is done in Linux. Simple protection and more effective, as the OddJob trojan shows, than a virus scanner.

And you can extend the analogy to social media... I'm as likely to want to interact with my bank via facebook/twitter/etc as I am my plumber.

If my plumber tried to "befriend" me, I'd get a new plumber.

While in the £50 example the Bank required 2 pieces of authentication (passport and utility bill), don't forget that so does PayPal (user ID and password).

However to send £50 the Bank does not require the onerous set-up system that PayPal would require (involving automated calls and small transactions sent... and this ultimately requires on the Bank that the transactions post to having done KYC in the first place).

In addition the Bank will take a variety of IDs, while PayPal will only ever take the two. So, who is really the most flexible here!

Basically the announcement was a more complicated version of the Orange/Barclaycard Android phone/app.

Probably worth mentioning that Android is a version of Linux itself (a distro).

Also, Apple's much touted OS is simply another open source system called BSD, which has a less restrictive licence than Linux (Linux insists that all versions of it must remain open source, BSD does not).

I'm pretty sure Direct debits are in scope of SEPA since I've been working on them for the last several years...