Community

The success of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest - and, for that matter, Finextra - proves that social media is not a case of "winner takes all". That said, the failure of SwiftCommunity.net suggests that the community of SWIFT practitioners is not large enough to support a separate network. Besides, much of its key functionality can be delivered via LinkedIn Groups.

I'd love to hear about any adopters - early or late - of electronic PIN delivery achieving competitive advantage. 

A quick scan through Paul Krugman's NYT article and the 100+ comments below it exposes many more reasons for rising cash volumes: Lack of incentive of moving cash to CDs, fixed deposits and savings account due to low interest rates; high surcharge on credit card payments; ePayment friction; merchants' reluctance to accept credit cards; perception of better budgetary control by using cash; "Cyprus Syndrome", and so on. None of these relates to tax evasion. 

So, while tax evasion has been the traditional driver for earning and holding money in cash, it's no longer the sole - or even the main - factor for rising cash volumes. In fact, I strongly suspect that big ticket tax evasion has actually moved away from cash into realtime electronic payments between a web of shell corporations in dozens of offshore locations all over the world. 

Actually, the industry is way off from coming up with compelling alternatives for many even more critical paper-based items: cash (its use is raising), cheques (UK government canceled abolition of cheques even by 2018), bills (ebills have less than 30% penetration), plastic cards (where are the mobile wallets?), and so on. PIN Mailers will have to wait their turn!

I agree that a BPM layer is an effective way of implementing account portability. In fact, instead of a web of bilateral BPM layers between banks, a central BPM hub at the "scheme-level" might prove most efficient. However, isn't the initiative meant to ensure that there's no "hassle and upset of account switching"?

I share your pet peeve about being asked for loyalty cards: According to personal experience and anecdotal evidence, "Haben Sie SuperCard?" is easily the Most Frequently Used German Expression wherein store attendants at Coop ask customers if they have the leading Swiss retailer's loyalty card. With so many attendants asking it so frequently, you could hear the question well before you reached the checkout yourself - and had to hear it once again, addressed to yourself! Thankfully, I escaped the English version since the nearest superstore (Asda) didn't - and still doesn't - have a loyalty program.

Kudos to Australia's banks for initiating an FPS-like payment system. 

Despite the proliferation of electronic payment systems like FPS, SEPA, TARGET2, NEFT, Expedited Payments in the last five years, the total amount of currency in circulation has only gone up. Partly because people might have returned to cash and partly because a lot of new people are "coming into money" and the usual sequence for a lot of people is money > spending > banking > cashless methods of payments.

Some 50 years ago, a Lufthansa aircraft flying from Frankfurt to New York and carrying millions of dollars back to New York from abroad unloaded all that currency at a Lufthansa-owned warehouse in JFK, from where most of it - estimated at US$ 6M - was looted in what was then the largest cash robbery in the American history. I was tickled no end to read that a very similar heist took place just a couple of weeks ago, only that the airline involved in the recent incident was SWISS, flying from Zurich to New York. So much for cashless society, which I'm sure is not going to happen even after 190 years.

For a long time, alternative payments have simply been offering a new form factor (e.g. mobile wallet) on top of the same old card network rails. We're recently seeing a change, with a spate of banks (e.g. Barclays) and nonbanks (e.g. Dwolla) introducing new methods of payment that bypass traditional card rails. By (potentially) offering lower MDF / MSC, they're likely to find favor with merchants. However, their value proposition to the consumer is unclear: Will they offer rewards and deferred payment, two benefits enjoyed by consumers with traditional credit cards? Performance of similar programs from multibank consortia has so far been mixed: While China UnionPay has been a resounding success, RuPay has barely managed to scratch the surface of retail payments in India, with its offering still restricted to debit cards. This is in spite of the fact that both China UnionPay and Rupay cover every bank in their respective country, and not just a handful. 

USA shrugged off EMV as irrelevant initially on the ground that card authorizations were happening there in realtime, unlike in Europe. 

India implemented 2FA two years ago and Mobile OTP a couple of months ago for online card transactions, which virtually eliminate CNP fraud. Recent moves by several banks in India to introduce Chip-and-PIN cards does signal their recognition that CP fraud is not as insignificant.

Not sure about other countries but, singling out USA and India, I think the issues are more broadbased than denial / under-reporting.

I'm not the only one who finds that "Handing over a card is normal behavior". 

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/07/03/why-mobile-payments-will-never-take-off/

"If someone has to touch my card, I will often just walk away from the purchase." Not sure if merchants and issuers thought of this use case.