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Is this a post from 1991 or 2011? 

This has a Churchillian ring - 'not the beginning of the end but rather the end of the beginning', but it is also reminiscent of the words of Magnus Pym, the lead character in John Le Carre's 'A Perfect Spy': 'this may be the end but from where I am sitting it really looks more like the beginning'. That's just before he goes into his bathroom and shoots himself. 

Do you mean the Fork Handle model?

One cannot be sure of that. What if an unscrupulous individual developed a form of reader that they could secrete inside their overcoat using battery power? Then, on a crowded form of public transport, they could innocuously place themselves adjacent to other passengers whereupon, when the device detected a contactless card about the person of their fellow passenger, they would be alerted by a bleep into an earpiece, and could charge off 22p per card - try that on the 17.25 Waterloo-Guildford with every third commuter having such a card (20 out of 60, if Visa are to be believed) and you would be well in the money.

Is that anything to do with the Four Candle model?

There was a power cut at Thames Ditton station on Monday so one could not 'tap in' with Oyster. NFC is 100% electric dependent. SWTrains staff seated comfortably in the waiting room said 'no problem, there will be staff at Waterloo who know all about this and will make sure you don't overpay'. The response at Waterloo (surprise, surprise): 'never heard of no power cut, mister, you should have got a paper ticket, now tap out and pay the maximum fare or we'll give you an on-the-spot fine'. A typical face-to-face experience with a faceless organisation. The assumption was that the consumer was lying and trying to evade payment, and with no proof in one's hand, one is at the mercy of self-appointed monopolistic (Thames Ditton is only served by one train company) authority acting under their one-sided Terms and Conditions, which have to be accepted on pain of denial of service. As for Visa's statements, the timeless 'well he would say that, wouldn't he?' hits the mark, or, should I say, communicates with the near field?

Is this not a problem that is germane to 'cloud' - an archipelago of shared services facilities?

Is this a story from March 2011, or March 2001? Wasn't Bolero a SWIFT initiative in trade finance from the early 2000s that was re-sprayed and re-launched by SWIFT as the Trade Service Utility (TSU)? Or is TSU a ringer of Bolero, in other words some of the components were stripped off it, combined with other pieces, and launched as a new model? It is all most beguiling. TSU claims to be able to do everything that Bolero claims this deal will enable it to do so which is the engine inside the other?

I am a Lloyds TSB customer and I use their legacy suite of PFM tools available via mobile, internet, ATM and paper: the bank statement. That tells me what I spent and what on. Amazing - you get the amount, the date and the payee all on the same page. That's got to be a winner: I could imagine that 65% of retail customers and 56% of corporate customers would consider switching banks for access to that kind of PFM tool coming through the letterbox.

Antti - SEPA may even have a reverse gear if the current STP and service level/functions on domestic payments are reduced during a transition to XML, merely because of mismatches between legacy and SEPA schemes.