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People may not settle for anything but the original of a cheque but, ironically, cheque truncation has proven to be a highly successful use case for digitization of physical objects. On the other hand, adoption of digitization has been well below expectation for bills, statements and other brick-and-mortar items where a trusted digital copy would appear to suffice. This suggests that the critical success factor for digitization is closely related to whether the natural consequences of digitization - passwords, for example - are compatible with pre-existing processes and user behavior. In the case of cheques, they are; and, as I'd highlighted in How Suitable Is Email For Delivering Bills And Statements?, in the case of bills and statements, they are not.

@AlexP:

At the risk of going off the track here, I can't help recalling my experience with a leading bank in Germany when I read your reference to network connectivity: After withdrawing cash from a Frankfurt-based ATM of a Top 5 German bank headquartered in Frankfurt, the account balance displayed on the ATM doesn't change. To see the latest balance, I'd have to insert my debit / ATM card into a separate statement printing machine. The ATM shows the latest balance only on the next day.

This disconnect was caused not because of lack of connectivity - the ATM was on the grid 24/7 - but because the bank's accounting system sent out account balances to the ATM switch only at midnight. 

Lest we rule out such disjointed behavior of disparate systems in 2013, even today the Twitter widget on my WordPress blog often takes several hours to display tweets posted by me via a popular social media dashboard. Surprising, considering that all the involved systems are actually resident on the cloud and, hence, available on the grid 24/7. But true. 

TY for the clarification but my understanding is different. According to this Finextra article quoting a Visa exec, "...in the US, we can rely on online processing where transactions are transmitted in real-time to the issuer for approval ... there's no need for the offline authentication that was the genesis of chip-and-PIN". A few years ago, I remember reading other articles from independent analysts saying the same thing. If I manage to locate them, I'll post hyperlinks to them. Anyway, with all the buzz around mobile payments, which will NOT be EMV-compliant, this point is moot anyway. 

More like miscommunication rather than misconception: I've added CLARIFICATORY NOTES IN UPPERCASE to make my previous comment more clear about what I meant: "EMV may be worth it in markets like Europe where card payment authorizations IN THE MAGSTRIPE ERA  (reportedly) USED TO happen offline AND HENCE REQUIRED EMV TO MAKE THEM HAPPEN ONLINE but not in markets like USA where they (reportedly) happen online EVEN WITH MAGSTRIPE.

Let claimants decide whether CMCs are required or not. No one is forcing them to go to CMCs. If they do go to them, they are happy to have their blood sucked or ambulance chased. With banks trying to canvass the regulator to set an unrealistically tight deadline for submission of claims - an attempt that the regulator has deftly parried, I must say - it'd be naive for claimants to believe that banks would work with their (i.e. claimants') interest in mind.

@FinextraMember: Not just Pune, OFSSL - my ex-employer - is another thing in common. But, appearances can be deceptive - I promise that there's no Pune conspiracy :-) Not sure whether PingIt supports transfers from/to non-Barclays accounts now but when it was launched, it only supported payments between Barclays accounts i.e. it was closed-loop. That that extent, if somebody from Barclays said PingIt took inspiration from M-PESA - another closed-loop system - it's understandable. However, the VocaLink system runs on a separate platform, it's open-loop, it can't be treated as an extension of PingIt, hence I don't find it resonating with M-PESA. 

Ultimately, everything is money, but at the level of channel and method of payment that we're operating in, cash and A2A are significantly different, if for no other reason than that A2A requires bank accounts and cash does not.

Here's one the press and the average John Doe should be able to understand: "With VocaLink's new mobile payment system, you can send a payment to anyone in the UK. With M-PESA, you can only send a payment to a Safaricom subscriber." This is not a problem in Kenya where Safaricom has >70% market share but it's a big limitation in UK and many other countries where no single MNO has such a dominant share of the market. Incidentally, M-PESA failed to take off even in the neighboring Tanzania. Likewise, M-PAISA, its Indian version. Not to undermine M-PESA's achievement but it's hardly a lighthouse for the whole world.

By definition, undeclared income doesn't enter the banking system, so people with undeclared income won't use ATMs. Maybe I'm missing something here but how can ATM users constitute the right target group for such a campaign?  

According to anecdotal evidence, over 90% of cardholders don't read their statements. This totally resonates with my personal experience. Which is perhaps why the Indian regulator issued a diktat that banks must send realtime SMS alerts to cardholders everytime a card has been charged. This is a far more practical way of spotting and reporting frauds. For those who can't get such alerts from their banks, a service like BillGuard might be a more practical way of protecting oneself from card frauds. (Full Disclosure: Apart from finding it to be a great service, I have no personal or professional interest in BillGuard).

There's simply no comparison between this and M-PESA. The UK system is open-loop, works across multiple banks, will hopefully be MNO-agnostic, involves no cash and is, above all, an extension of the pre-existing online A2A transaction type to the mobile phone form factor. M-PESA is closed-loop, is used by people in lieu of bank accounts, works only on one MNO (Safaricom), is used primarily for cash transfers between Safaricom's customers.