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Agreed. Contrary to popular belief, the rise of M-PESA has not reduced the amount of cash in circulation. As BBC reminds its readers, "...M-Pesa is a system for moving cash around, not a system to eliminate it. Users still hand cash to the M-Pesa vendors to top-up their accounts, and retrieve cash from them when money is sent to them."

This definitely resonates with my personal experience of trying out mobile payments from MNOs and nonbanks before finally settling down on one from a bank. However, I'm not sure about the same applying to first time users / millennials for reasons highlighted in my following post:

Appealing To Millennials - The Challenge For PayZapp Mobile Wallet

It's easy to predict 10 to 20 years ahead but let me go out on a limb and predict that the current crop of wannable bank disruptors will disappear if they fail to kill banks in the next 3-5 years. 

If a bank is the one that directly stands to benefit from the relationship, it's only fair for the bank to incur the cost and trouble of gathering all this info. It's customary for banks to obtain them from customers and from FATF and other third-party data sources by subscribing to them - not from the government. Despite availability of technology, it's not so easy for a government to obtain all this info - much less share them with a bank - because of privacy and data security laws.

TY @JohnCandido. Apple Pay seems to operate in the same fashion as the CBA app in terms of letting you control the use of the card(s) on file in many ways but, as far as I could make out, doesn't provide an "on-off" button. On a side note, this is one more case that reinforces my belief that striking the right tradeoff between convenience and security in retail payments is tricky. Had the bank implemented a separate activation for contactless functionality in addition to the one for basic card activation, I can imagine many people - me included! - complain about having to jump too many hoops to start using the card!

TY @JeremyLight, the infographic does list several areas of use of BTC in real world commerce. Leave it to you to decide when to ask for the said Vince Cable style hat to be eaten:)

On another note, haven't all - contactless or "contactful" - cards needed activation / opt-in in Australia? Maybe things have changed now but, when I got my credit cards in Germany, UK and India several years ago, I was required to call a tollfree number before I could use them for the first time.

I maybe going slightly off the track here but, in response to @LuZurawski, I remember reading an article where an iPhone6 user in USA found the Apple Pay authorization screen popping up near the turnstile at an amusement park, when the NFC was used for access control, not payment! Not sure whether on-off feature will be supported on mobile or contactless anytime soon! 

Over the last couple of years, we've been hearing that BTC is being accepted at overstock.com, some higher education institution (don't recall the name but it's apparently a portfolio company of Andreessen Horowitz VC firm), and so on. Any idea what percentage of BTC volumes and growth come from these "real world" businesses? 

Okay, fine, but my consumer finance experience is quite different from yours. I've used both banks and nonbanks for personal cross-border remittance for over two decades and the experience w.r.t transparency of fees and CX have been more or less the same.

I'm not so sure that business sector will benefit from nonbanks anytime soon because (1) In the nearly 10 years that I've been hearing this contention, nonbanks haven't made much progress for business cross-border payments (2) Nonbanks are VC-funded and most VCs are wary about funding B2B startups.

Who is to say "how much is too much"?  By the same token,

1. Whole countries have claimed that Chip + PIN is a waste of money. 
2. STRIPE lambasts 2FA / 3DS by saying that it results in loss of revenues (https://support.stripe.com/questions/does-stripe-support-3d-secure-verified-by-visa-mastercard-securecode).

End of the day, fraud metrics can work both ways.