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One side of the company does auditing, the other side provides consulting. One side sells subprime bonds, the other side bets against subprime bonds. One side makes news, the other side reports news. All of them sidestep conflict of interest by saying "Chinese Wall". The guy who invented the term deserves the biggest bonus.

This sounds archaic even if mobile wallets are not mainstream. But, just like Mobile RDC for remote cheque truncation has become the hottest mobile banking app, I won't be surprised if Ping Wallet turns out to be a big hit.

With its low friction and negligible transaction processing fees, Bitcoin does seem very promising. On another blog, I highlighted micropayments as a powerful use case for BTC. However, when I keep reading that you can't pay for a latte with Bitcoin now, I start wondering, what can you do with it now?

During the same period, I'm sure digital channel usage also declined from the same locations. Seems that overall business climate determines branch opening / closure rate, not digital channels. 

@JohnC:

TY for your comment. I can assure you that I've read more than I've written and can make available a detailed Excel model should you be interested. 

I didn't comment about CASH versus NONCASH. I compared CASH with MOBILE. My point was, based on the figures, 14B is not zero, #2 is not dead and, therefore, the conclusion "Cash out, mobile in" is seriously wrong.

I agree with your conclusion that NONCASH overtakes CASH by 2022. But, I've heard that said even today with one estimate putting share of NONCASH at 90% of current transaction volume! 

Contrary to what we've been hearing over the past few years - "MOBILE is killing CARD" - CASH will cede its current #1 position to CARD (47%) by 2022, not MOBILE / INTERNET (4%). 

@BrettK:

TY for your comment.

Surely "Cash out, mobile in" sounds binary!

That said, the retail payments space is indeed currently full of pro-cash and anti-cash trends and countertrends viz. Growing friction for online payments; Cash on Delivery for eCommerce (#1 in India apart from Japan as you've pointed out); Impact of card surcharge; Generational shifts; etc. 10 years should be long enough for these factors to play themselves out and for clarity to emerge. I agree with your conclusion, "We'll need to wait another 10+ years to know for sure how the trend is firming up and what impact it is having on cash." 

Maybe I'm overly sensitive to high school mathematics but 14B CASH as against 1.5B MOBILE / INTERNET transactions (both in 2022) doesn't quite translate to the conclusion, "cash out, mobile in" for me. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation would show that, out of the 5 methods of payments listed by UKPC, CASH will be the #2 with a 38% market share (14B/36.386B) in 2022 (as against #1 and 60% in 2012). To all but the most severely arithmetically challenged or with an ax to grind against cash or both, 38% won't sound like zero, and #2 won't seem like death. To the mathematically interested, UKPC's estimate for cash transactions translates to a 10 Year Growth Rate of -33% and pegs the "zero cash day" sometime in 2112, i.e. 100 years away - which is far, far away from 2022. This is assuming that the same growth rates continue.

This brings us to the really interesting story in these estimates: Mobile plus Internet payments will manage to garner merely 4% (1.5B/36.386B) of retail payment transaction volumes by 2022. For all the hype surrounding mobile payments and the millions of dollars poured into them during the last few years, such a negligible share for mobile payments might seem irrational. Not sure how many investors will stay invested for so little so late. To paraphrase John M Keynes, looks like the payments market will stay irrational longer than most mobile payment providers will stay solvent.

Stripe could be a great alternative to PayPal if it doesn't freeze merchant accounts as often and as indiscriminately as PayPal. 

While folks keep arguing about what is a fair measure and what is not, banks go laughing all the way to the - er - bank.

Some might argue that, with more than 50% of its revenues coming from mobile phones and music players, $AAPL is a consumer electronics, not an IT, company. But, that hardly matters. What does matter is what an industry standard like FORTUNE 500 says. And it says that AAPL is an IT company. So, the market accepts that. It also doesn't report Earnings Per Employee. So, the market ignores that - at least I don't know any market that finds that relevant.

I've seen metrics like EPS, P/E, PEG, RPP and so on used to compare companies within a given industry. Not sure which segment of the market considers Earnings Per Employee as a relevant metric since a leading source like FORTUNE 500 has stopped reporting # of Employees, let alone Earnings Per Employee. 

Nevertheless, it's good to know that IT ranks above banking on that metric. Although I'm keen on knowing the impact on that metric when HPQ, the #2 IT company, enters your calculations, along with its whopping US$ 12.65B loss. 

Meanwhile, profit is understood by everyone and it's used by FORTUNE 500, the world's #1 cross-industry list. That makes profit a good enough metric for assessing efficiency or value or value creation or whatever else that matters to the market. On that count, banking is #1.

With US$ 200B in profits, financial services is the most profitable industry in the latest FORTUNE 500 list. Therefore, in terms of running an efficient operation, banks should be the ones teaching other industries. Besides, when a bank enjoys the unique luxury of being able to "privatize its gains and socialize its losses", to quote a modern day saying, why should it lose that advantage by becoming part of IT or any other industry?