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At last Visa Europe admits to the reality that has stared at Visa Inc USA all along: VbV is painful; No leading online merchant has implemented it in USA (e.g. Amazon USA) despite FFIEC having mandated 2FA way back in c. 2005 - presumably because it causes more revenue loss due to shopping cart abandonment than fraud loss it prevents; I haven't heard a single report of fraud loss killing a single online merchant. If Visa Europe really goes ahead with plans for a "fantabulous stealth geo-located, fingerprinted, voice activated authentication" - to borrow from @MichaelD's comment - it will once again walk alone. I don't see any chance of Visa USA adopting such a "beast".

Apart from "... elderly people who generally prefer cash", there's the demographic segment of people like me who become elderly waiting for cashless to happen and, when it doesn't, must "prefer cash"? :)

What's worse, I'm not sure if there's any way for the MNO consortium to prevent a recurrence of such a problem in future. Some degree of schadenfreude is only to be expected but let's keep in mind such a branding nightmare could happen to anyone, anytime.

If the GBP 5 in the Oyster Card never expires, it's not such a bad thing - after all, the prepaid card business supposedly runs on a clear assumption of a certain level of breakage. While I'm no fan of a business refusing to accept the legal tender, is there anything stopping people from unchecking the default auto topup option? A simpler solution would be to stipulate upon TfL that auto topup should be made opt-in (as against opt-out as at present).

@AndyH: TY. I was now able to download the report. 

By acting as a master acquirer, PayPal enabled more online merchants to accept card payments. In this process, PayPal expanded the interchange base of banks to businesses that wouldn't have qualified for acquirer accounts directly from banks. To me, that sounds like PayPal acts as an agent of banks, not adversary. Even without PayPal, banks could only see the merchant ID and total spend, never the individual line items of spend. 

Great stuff. I just headed over to the Twitter feed and found my latest two comments at the top of the timeline (http://ow.ly/i/63bey). So, the "very near future" is already here!

Couple of suggestions for "the next release":

1. Use the commenter's Twitter Handle (@s_ketharaman) instead of their name in the comment tweet e.g. ".@s_ketharaman just said..." instead of "Ketharaman Swaminathan just said". (I'm sure you don't need me to explain the purpose of the dot at the start)
2. Use the author's Twitter Handle (if available) in the post tweet e.g. ".@PatPatel wrote The Middle Eastern..." instead of "The Middle Eastern...".

This resonates very well with my own experiences covered in Mobile Wallets: Fix What's Broken - And It Ain't Payments and Accelerating Mobile Wallet Adoption By Fixing What's Broken. Since I wrote these posts, I came across a neat implementation of a mobile commerce (loyalty, ordering, payment) app from FAASO's, a QSR that specializes in rolls. For downloading and installing the app, the company gives INR 250 credit, which can be used up through multiple INR 50 discounts on delivery orders placed via mobile app. Interestingly, the same discount is NOT available fororders placed in the company's physical outlets. So, here's one company that has not only launched a mobile app but is pushing it on a preferential basis.

It's not my bank's business what I do with my retailer and, by the same token, it's not my retailer's business what I do with my bank. With that basic premise established, I've received good targeted offers of banking products from banks (e.g. my comment on https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=9573), bad ones of retail products from retailers (e.g. my posts titled Loyalty Or Disloyalty Programs? and 
Beware Of Losing Sales With Bad Loyalty Programs on my company blog, hyperlinks removed) and none of telecom products from MNOs (e.g. Whither Upselling With eBills?).

As a technology marketer, I'd love it if all service providers used cutting edge technology to build affinity and do all those nice things. But, as a service provider or customer, why should I care if the service provider uses legacy technology or open systems or no technology at all to do the same? Whether it's easy or hard, banks have a better track record of delivering results in this space than other industries.

From eating crow about banning cheques a couple of years ago to making it easier to handle cheques - at last, better sense has prevailed! With a doubling in usage in one year, Mobile RDC has indeed proven to be the killer mobile banking app that I'd predicted. In all the time and trouble I've taken doing ePayments, I could've processed many more cheques with Mobile RDC.