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Merchant adoption of mobile payments faces another challenge: Since they won't use plastic, even in-store mobile payments will reportedly be treated as Card Not Present transactions, attracting the higher interchange fees due on them.

Fully agree. Without saying it in as many words, you've made the oft-missed point that a mobile banking app installed on a registered mobile phone automatically achieves one-factor authentication. It's really questionable if the app must also demand a password and thereby achieve two-factor authentication for something simple like account balance inquiry. Traditionally, banks have seen mobile banking as an adjunct of Internet Banking - many banks I know activate mobile banking only to those customers who are registered for Internet Banking. From the long list of banks you have cited who are launching instant balance inquiry on mobile phones, I am heartened to note that the traditional thinking is making way for a more sensible treatment of mobile as an independent, powerful channel in itself. 

While banks are at it, I hope they throw personalized offers and a few more things outside the walled garden. They should realize that Tap Buy, Times intARact and a few other nonbanking offer providers actually use push notification technology to proactively push out offers on the smartphones of registered users who don't even have to fire up the app, let alone enter a password.

Although no one "would say no", only bankers seem to be "given the chance". Banking is the only industry I can think of where (a) the employer realizes returns from a deal over several years but the employee receives the bonus on the total deal size on the same year that the deal was struck (b) gains are personalized but losses are socialized. Greed / avarice are as much part of human fraily as the tendency to not say no given the chance, so I'm not sure if passing laws against greed / avarice would work. A more practical solution would be to pay out bonuses to bankers strictly in lockstep with the actual inflow of projected deal benefits.

I agree that banks have access to a lot of customer spend data. Banks like BankAm have already announced concrete initiatives to use suitable technology to help convert that data into insights and drive upselling and cross-selling. At this point, it would help other banks decide whether to follow suit or not if vendors of such technology can share concrete findings from such initiatives.

Cash or Currency involve physical exchange. Money is a legal tender of exchange and is involved even when the exchange happens electronically e.g. Money Transfer Operator, Fund Transfer, etc. 

Far as I know, M3 is updated at country / city level when currency notes move from one country / city to another.

The problem with "checking account", "mobile payments" and other popular terms is that, well, they're popular! Even if they might appear ill-defined in hindsight, they're so well entrenched in the popular lexicon that individual service providers might find it unviable to correct their definitions. Even the mighty Facebook had to reconcile itself with this harsh reality recently: Explaining its rationale for shutting down "Facebook Credits", Facebook admitted that people have such deeply entrenched notions about the term "money" that it wasn't worth its while to try and educate them about an alternative medium of exchange called "Facebook Credits".

Open-loop mobile payments like Google Wallet and M-PESA use banking or MNO rails, both of which already enjoy reasonable amount of trust of the average consumer. If we take closed-loop mobile payments, only consumers who trust the merchant's basic product (e.g. Coffee) will even visit the store and try out the merchant's mobile payment product (e.g. Starbucks Prepaid Card). Trust is a given under this situation. Against this backdrop, unless "trust" and "security" are used interchangeably, I don't know what more trust mobile payments need to cultivate with consumers. (I accept that trust is a far more important issue in a merchant's acceptance of a certain payment method versus another e.g. If PayPal keeps freezing a merchant's account for no apparent reason, I expect that merchant to lose trust in PayPal and refuse to sign up for accepting its PayPal Here mobile payment product. But, I'm unable to link this context of trust with secure element or secure identity). 

Even leaving aside "soft" issues like perception, consumer behavior and communication strategy, the fundamental point is this: Any given entity can have different representations under different frames of references. This doesn't make one of those representations wrong. A mobile payment does result in increments and decrements of a certain number at the database level but it undeniably involves transfer of what everybody accepts as money / consideration in the real-world level. I see a place for both representations of mobile payments, depending on the frame of reference used in a given context. As a matter of fact, even banknotes are numbers in a central bank's money supply ("M3") databases. If I were to stuff some currency notes in an envelope and send it to someone, there's a decrement in one M3 database and an increment in another M3 database. This doesn't take away the fact that banknotes are a form of money. 

Oh yes, IBM has done it. While I can't recall the name, there was a hedge fund that based its entire trading philosophy on the basis of Twitter sentiment of underlying securities. 

This payment method not only bypasses banking rails but also seems to disintermediate Boku, Zong and other providers of GenY / MNO-Billing Mobile Payments. It would be interesting to watch how many other MNOs spurn Boku, Zong, et al, and follow in Telefonica's footsteps.

Sorry Nationwide, a 26% week-on-week rise in account openings by itself doesn't prove that "Customers are clearly unhappy with recent events and are opting to vote with their feet." Tens of millions of people have been affected by the events at RBS, NatWest and Barclays. Only if Nationwide's account openings last week and this week are of similar order of magnitude does it follow that many people outraged by their existing banks really switched to Nationwide from last week to this week. In the absence of absolute figures for account openings, a 26% week-on-week rise really doesn't mean much.

Decoupled debit pioneer Tempo Payments shut down a year or two ago following a losing battle to enter the mainstream. Google Wallet and other mobile payments are struggling to gain mainstream adoption. When you combine the two, you surely get a patent but only time will tell whether commercial success will follow.