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A tad ambitious for mobile NFC payments perhaps!  5 years after the launch of contactless payments in the UK market share is I believe at about 0.03%.  Are we seriously expected to believe that the subset of mobile contactless payments will increase to 30% over the next 3 years?

Yes, Andy's blog draws exactly the opposite conclusion - the UK leads the world in e-commerce and e-banking precisely because our banking and card payments community have got their act together. 

Nice post Andy!  It's interesting that the UK is so "e-friendly" and contrary to the other comment (from PayPal?) I agree with your analysis that much of the credit should go to the UK banking and card payments community.  I'd add the high penetration of 3D Secure (SecureCode; VbV) and Remote chip Authentication (PINSentry etc) to your factors.

On a similar note, yesterday I came across a statistic that, according to a First Annapolis survey, a huge 40% of UK MasterCard/Visa payments were card-not-present transactions.  Can this be true - anyone have any similar global statistics?

Meanwhile, looking at the original Boston Consulting piece you referenced, it seems that 70% of us brits would rather give up alcohol for a year rather than their broadband, and 25% sex!  Irational exuberance, surely :-).

Excellent post Elizabeth, and very timely.  It's about time the pendulum of fashion started swinging back in favour of good old fashioned banking and payments infrastructure.

Nice blog Andy.  Yes, it would be altogether healthier and more transparent if UK banks charged for the various services they provided including cheques and current accounts.  This is what seems to happen in most of the rest of the world and also for business accounts here in the UK.  But as you say, now the genie is out of the bottle it is very difficult to get it back in and a bank would need to be very brave to break ranks.  Having said this, I notice that Santander is charging £2 per month for an account which offers benefits such as chargebacks - maybe this is the way to go.

In the current climate of indiscriminate banker bashing, it's nice to see that at least one part of the industry - UK payments - has a success story to tell, thanks mainly to deployment of chip and PIN in both the physical and virtual worlds.

Meanwhile, it seems that fraud is now migrating to the next weak link, in the form of telephone banking.  Years ago I was predicting that voice verification, coupled with automated speech recognition, would emerge as the long term solution here (see http://www.collinconsulting.co.uk/main-menu-resources/white-papers/112-voice-verification.html).  It would be interesting to know if the technology has now matured sufficiently for large scale commercial rollout, and if so, why no-one has deployed it yet.  Or would a dynamic form of 3D Secure (OTP generated by chip card) be a better bet?

Excellent initiative!  Faster Payments is one of the great unsung achievements of the UK payments community and it's about time they started building added value services on top of it.  But what's the story behind Barclays jumping the gun with Pingit?  Does anyone know?

Well that's a bit underwhelming.  And a missed opportunity to support full chip and PIN.

Presumably the big US issuers prefer chip and signature because it gives them a higher interchange rate, and Visa is bowing to pressure from them.  Sad if true.

Big mistake!  One of the key advantages of EMV chip is that it facilitates PIN verification which is, of course, much more secure than signature verification.  It also features offline PIN verification, enabling offline and unattended terminals.  It's really quite straightforward to switch from signature to PIN as the UK's Chip & PIN project demonstrated back in 2004.  And both merchants and consumers prefer it.  I doubt if anyone in the UK would want to go back to signature.