Community

If Visa is taking such obviously-controversial steps, it'd appear that it has adequate coverage in its sponsorship contract to do so. In that case, a fair share of the blame for such inconveniences must go the organizers as well. Would be interesting to know the outcome of the last two furores related to ticket booking and card expiration date. 

Thanks for clarifying. I think there are two issues here: Mobile Wallet and Usability. Since you were able to manage your hotel booking via smartphone / tablet, am curious to know which mobile wallet is supported by your hotel booking website / app. Coming to usability, as I'd pointed out in my personal blog post "Will Mobile Blogs Impoverish Bloggers?", there are as many examples of good UX via mobile web as there are of bad UX via downloadable mobile apps. The lack of mobile booking solution for train ticket might harken back to deficiences even in the PC-Web solution and I doubt if mobile web or downloadable mobile app will have any bearing on UX. 

Okay, thanks. BIAN is still WIP and doesn't have mainstream adoption by European banks yet. So, a more pragmatic strategy for banks in Asia would be to skip BIAN altogether and leapfrog themselves to the next flavor of the season that is bound to follow BIAN in another few years. Asian banks have achieved competitive advantage with similar strategies in the past - as with skipping point solutions and leapfrogging into CBS and forsaking full-fledged multichannel support to take an early lead in omnichannel banking - and I see no reason why they should deviate from their course with BIAN now. 

By the same token, Japan has been running its trains and buses flawlessly for several decades, without closing down half its services for maintenance every weekend. Just as TfL can't get Japan's train and bus systems, it has to make do with the implementation of NFC that's available in the UK. To be fair to TfL, having done a fantastic job with Oyster contactless cards - I do love the way they work reliably even when they're not taken out from my wallet - I can very well understand its reluctance to jump into NFC. Apart from slow read speeds - at least in the UK implemenation - NFC means I've to take out my smartphone, select the appropriate app, fire it up and wait till it's ready. These are time-consuming and friction-filled steps that I can be spared. NFC is not just a solution chasing for a problem but something that introduces problems of its own that are absent with the status quo.

Comparing an electronic payment with a courier consignment and seeking transparency at all steps along the way somewhat obscures the fundamental difference between the two: Both in theory and in actual practice in some corridors (viz. TARGET2 nations), an electronic payment can happen in realtime, obviating the need for any transparency except for immediate notification of credit to the beneficiary's account. A parcel sent via courier cannot, even in theory, reach the destination in real time, thus needing tracking facility to provide a sense of comfort to the sender and the receiver. Given a choice between a payment that reaches the destination in 1 hour but offers zero transparency (e.g. Western Union) and another that takes 7 days - only because several parties earn float along the way - but provides full transparency, I'll any day prefer the former and even be prepared to pay a premium for it.

BTW, nonbank MTOs like Xoom do provide step-by-step tracking for international payments. But, when things go wrong, they take shelter behind the same alleged complexities of cross-border remittances as banks. I remember a USA-to-India transaction that I'd initiated over Xoom. The tracker showed healthy progress for the first 4 days (USA > UK > Germany > ...). Then, on the fifth day, all hell seemed to have broken loose since the tracker turned to something like "#*!@!argh!..., payment failed, returned to USA"!

Assuming that you can buy your train ticket and check your bank account balance via PC-Web, am curious to know if you could do them via mobile web from your smartphone / tablet. At least in the case of train ticket, the lack of mobile booking solution might harken back to deficiencies even in the PC-Web solution viz. lack of support for e-tickets and the need to print out a paper ticket from a kiosk that is not necessarily present in all stations. In an extreme example dating back a few years, I remember that a colleague of mine booked a ticket online for a train departing from London Bridge station but had to visit Waterloo / Victoria to print out the paper ticket because there was no 'Fast Terminal' at London Bridge!

Back in 2007-08, I remember the Krispy Kremes doughnut store in Canary Wharf displaying one or two Barclays contactless card terminals prominently and my using them during every one of my visits. Finextra's experience at its local sandwich shop and elsewhere is a clarion call for bank and nonbank financial services providers to not only craft products that solve customer pain areas but also shout from the rooftop that they do so. If this is the state of affairs of contactless terminals that have been around for so many years, I wonder what fate awaits NFC mobile payments which impose even more friction for consumers in terms of firing up an app, selecting the appropriate card, entering a PIN and hoping for strong enough network signal.

Having worked for several years for a leading core banking software provider, I was curious to find out what kind of open standards exist in this space. After reading the entire article, I remain curious. Are we referring to open communication standards between CBS and surround systems (e.g. ISO8587 with ATM/POS Switches), which are already followed by leading CBS vendors and banks in Asia? Or, are we referring to open standards within the various modules of the CBS itself, which, far as I know, don't exist in Europe?

To add to @Finextra Member, there's one more hassle of having multiple accounts: Forgetting to declare a couple of them in your income tax return, only to be reminded by the taxman to cough up tax and penalty on the interest income accrued in them. Not a first world problem, probably, but can be a hassle in high interest economies like India.

By their very nature of having different withdrawal frequencies and lock in periods, money in different accounts is weighted differently for capital adequacy purposes. Therefore, even if banks' internal silos crumbled, I am not sure if they can offer @Finextra Member's dream account under the current regulatory framework. Besides, I'm sure bankers created different types of accounts only because people expressed different financial needs. I for one am perfectly comfortable about sweeping any surplus funds from my current / checking account into a separate savings account periodically. So might many others.

For several reasons - all genuine and compliant with its TOS - I have three different accounts with PayPal, so I don't know who are these nonbanks who are 'stepping in' to offer all-in-one-and-one-in-all type of accounts.

In the brave new world where Apple, Facebook, Google, PayPal, Square and scores of other non-banks are apparently threatening to disintermediate banks, I'd have thought that 'bank account' itself is an outdated term and that 'Non Bank Account' is the product that better captures the zeitgeist. Just joking...

Everyone understands what 'checking account' means. So, IMHO, it is a waste of marketing dollars for banks to rebrand 'checking account' to 'bank account' or some such thing. Besides, notwithstanding what analysts and statistics say about the declining use of checks - BTW, I find this spelling far more phonetic than the contrived alternative - we see fairly contradictory trends on the ground:

1. Even Internet-only accounts now offer check books e.g. ING Direct USA.
2. Mobile RDC for offsite deposit of checks is perhaps the only 'killer app' in mobile banking in the US today.
3. To set up a bank account for direct credit via EFT, the Indian regulator asks for a canceled check to prove account ownership. Paradoxical as this might sound, I trust the regulator to know what it is doing. Among other accomplishments, it has established an ePayment system called NEFT in India, which has been hailed as one of its kind by BIS in its recent report on global retail payments innovations. In any case, banks have no choice but to comply with the regulator's edict, paradoxical or not.

Just as analysts have been predicting the death of cash for over five decades, I expect their predictions about checks to last at least half as long. Until then, 'checking account' is quite fine.