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Not much point unless Barclays gives out merchant / acquirer accounts more easily than otherwise. Much of SQUARE's success can be attributed to its placing itself as a "master merchant" and enabling mobile merchants to accept card payments without having to apply to banks for merchant accounts - and inevitably face rejection because banks find their risk profile too high to qualify. 

Hypothetically, what about an onsite program manager giving short shift to testing in order to "secure" the deadline so that, again hypothetically, the bank executive's annual bonus is not impacted by slippage? How well does that help in these situations? Does offshore or onsite matter then? Offshoring didn't start yesterday. The cold, hard truth is that offshoring has proven its superior price-performance for nearly two decades. Like with anything else, there are ways of getting offshoring right and there are ways of bungling it. Now that the subject of Germany has come up, the apprenticeship model works well there because that's one nation that has forever succeeded in translating its higher input costs to manufacture high quality, value-added products for which the rest of the world is willing to pay a premium, as evidenced by its top exporter nation status. There's no reason why the same model shouldn't work in any other country that matches Germany on that count.

Deadline pressures lead to compromises on testing. Barring divine intervention, IT meltdowns are the result. This universal truth applies regardless of whether offshore vendors or onsite Big 5 consulting firms are involved in the project. So, let's not blame offshoring for IT meltdowns in banks. Lloyds's own CEO does not - in his tweet, he totally exonerated offshoring for his bank's recent IT meltdown and placed the blame on the failure of an HP Server right "here in the UK".

https://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?NewsItemID=25653

I'm happy to see RBI at last admitting to onboarding friction being a key hurdle to widespread adoption of mobile banking in India. On another note, I've anecdotally never seen anyone who wanted a bank account to be without one in India. Now, with the availability of concrete figures - 450M bank accounts for 193M households (Source: Wikipedia) - the notions of unbanked / financial inclusion do appear to be on shaky grounds.

Going by this article written by Zilvinas Bareisis of Celent (http://bankingblog.celent.com/2014/02/the-challenge-of-making-mobile-payments-work-at-the-pos/), Mr. David Marcus would have had a tough time putting through a single in-store transaction with PayPal. No transaction, no fraud. Ergo, Marcus is absolutely right, just not for the reason he'd have us believe. 

At the risk of sounding facetious, some more big ticket Target-like breaches - Neiman Marcus? - will result in some more replacements of magstripe with chip-and-PIN cards and, eventually, the US might end up with EMV by default rather than design! 

BTW, any idea if banks can pass on the $170M cost (sorry @DavidA: 17M x $10 = $170M, not £170M) triggered by the Target breach to Target?

This problem has risen so sharply that Google recently stopped running online ads for "tech support".

TrueCaller is a popular Android app that helps decide whether the call is genuine or spam. (Full Disclosure: Apart from being a user of the app, I have no personal or professional interest in TrueCaller).

@ColinK: Mint, Geezeo and other PFM players have managed to provide exemplary account aggregation across 7K+ banks in USA. You've hit the nail on the head by pointing to the need for regulation. However, I don't find this regrettable: Regulatory intervention has proven to be the most powerful driver of action by banks worldwide when it comes to measures that undermine their revenues and profits. OFT mandated FPS in UK. A subsidiary of the central bank even runs the FPS-equivalent scheme in India. 

@MarkM: Interesting that you've raised the comparison with EPC / SEPA. The way EPC can mandate SEPA for all banks in EU, does FED have similar power over the American banking industry? From what I know, a move like this requires a GO verdict by a supermajority of NACHA members. Given that they just took a NO GO decision a couple of months ago, what really are the options available to the FED?

Not sure how this tallies with the Nov. 2013 veto of such a faster payments system by American banks: 

http://www.americanbanker.com/issues/178_219/how-big-banks-killed-a-plan-to-speed-up-money-transfers-1063631-1.html

In any case, isn't "pushes ahead" an over optimistic assessment, considering the Fed seemingly has a 10 year horizon?    

http://www.americanbanker.com/issues/178_221/message-to-banks-speed-up-payments-or-fed-will-take-charge-1063690-1.html