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Interesting comment from Google presentation at Somesso is the quote "A happy user is the best marketing that money can buy" - is this some of the value of Twitter?

At MPI Europe, we are also seeing clients taking the view that traditional destinations for IT outsourcing are becoming saturated, and that more sophisticated on-shore/off-shore models are being deployed which require elements of cultural fit, creativity, time zone match and intellectual property as well as pure productivity. So as part of this, firms are re-examining the potential geographic spread of their providers. In your piece, I am interested that you see Brazil as the natural partner for Spain, rather than the closer linguistic and cultural fit of Argentina where companies such as Globant are thriving, and putting a greater emphasis on European and US clients given their mid Atlantic timezone and other advantages. Indeed a recent report from my old firm KPMG (it seems to be the season for outsourcing reports) indicated that Buenos Aires was a new and growing hotspot as an outsourcing destination. So there are a range of options for firms looking for new and different outsourcing models and these options look likely to expand in the current challenging environment.  

This is interesting additional information on this topic and is in line with the patchwork implementation we have reported that is blunting the benefits of what is an innovative scheme. For example, in our recent research, MPI Europe have heard from a substantial group of what could be called “early adopters” who have been frustrated when trying to use Faster Payments (FP) in slightly different, or innovative, ways to do things like maximise their interest by using same day payments. Also due to fraud worries some are not able to initiate an FP payment through their internet banking application.

Consistent with the MoneyBox findings, one of the key trends they tell us is that they don’t know till they make the payment whether it can be an FP payment or not, due to restrictions on amounts, sort codes or channels. Without having a clear understanding of who is doing what and when we see consumers shying away from making full use of FP to make their payments later mainly because of the cross industry ambiguity and uncertainty. To address this, the banks need to solve the issues that are preventing them offering FP as a universal service including rolling it out across all channels, offering agency bank and corporate access and implementing stronger anti-fraud functionality.

There is more work to be done on Faster Payments in 2009 and beyond.

I almost totally agree with Roberts initial comment that although UKFP started as a regulatory driven programme, banks now view the service as a market opportunity. The one important difference is that I would add the caveat that it is "some banks now view the service as a market opportunity". Try this simple test to see the different approaches. Go to the member banks website/home page (list of member banks) and simply type in "Faster Payments" into their search function. Different banks will give you very different results - you can then draw your own conclusions as to who sees it as an opportunity!

An interesting additional opinion from the TowerGroup adding weight to our polarising assertion, although probably a smaller number of larger exchanges than we would currently predict. Could this be that they are discounting the new entrants - the Chi-X and Turquoise's - or is the assumption that global exchanges will follow the recent US model with these 'new kids' being swallowed up by the established players in a round of reconsolidation?

The implementation pressures and need to understand the wider impacts of this scheme have taken their toll indicated by the announcement of a delay of the Faster Payments implementation till next year.

Several people have asked how they can get more information on Faster Payments. In addition to the www.fastpayments.co.uk site, we are also running a training seminar on 17th July in central London - more details here.

Indeed it does have impact outside the US. The European CTO of a US HQed hedge fund I was with yesterday was concerned not only about the additional time it would take to perform the changes, but also that not all application patches were available yet.