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This misinformed discussion has been rumbling on for decades.  Just to be absolutely clear, Visa and MasterCard do not charge retailers fees!

I agree.  Deutche Bank seem to have got it wrong this time.  Both cash and cards will be around for very many years IMHO.

This is really clever! I wonder what Visa will come up with?

This idea seems to crop up every 5 years or so in one form or another but never come sto anything.  What happened to Monnet, EAPS, PayFair?  My bet is the MasterCard/Visa duopoly will reign supreme for the foreseeable future.

Yes, this is complete nonsense isn't it?

You're right Melvin - the comparethemarket.com survey is rubbish.  According to Finance UK "Fraud the Facts" 2018 total UK fraud across cards, cheques and online banking was £731 million in 2017, a 5% drop on 2016.

@ Ketharaman.  According to UK Finance, contactless transactions accounted for 32% of all card transactions in March 2017 - the latest stats I can find on the web.  So a figure of 46% of all card transactions doesn't sound unreasonable given a 95% growth in volumes since last year.  I agree with you that this probably just applies to MasterCard card transactions but presumably the Visa figures are similar.  Whatever, after a slow start, this is a remarkable success story which my own anecdotal experience as a London resident tends to confirm.  The really amazing change is a cultural one - people now use cards, usually contactless, to pay for very low value items such as a pint of beer or a sandwich and merchants accept that - this would be unthinkable 10 years ago.

I've always been intrigued by Push payments and disappointed that the UK banking industry has taken so long to exploit the superb Faster Payments infrastructure.  I first blogged about this in 2011.  MasterCard's branding and marketing expertise may be the missing ingredient for massive adoption.  I think displacement of card payments for e-commerce will only be a small part of the potential market in the longer term.  More important will be cash, cheques, person-to-person payments, bill payments, and all the other things we currently use Direct Credits for at the moment.  If you look at this development as the first steps towards a more user-friendly, less clunky online bank payment service then the long term potential is huge.

It's the old "hype curve" again :-) - see http://www.collinconsulting.co.uk/images/technology_innovation.pdf 

I think you're probably right Sadra.  It always takes much longer for the payments industry to change than anyone ever expects.  The EMV chip standard was introduced in the early 1990's and is only now starting to be adopted in the US!  Hopefully 3DS will evolve gradually in the direction of whatever is good about the W3C initiative.

Incidentally, I've noticed that I'm now rarely asked to complete 3DS authentication even on sites which support it.  Presumably my bank has implemented some kind of adaptive neural network fraud detection software and decided I'm relatively low risk!