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For both developed and developing markets, in their present form of being just another channel of accessing bank accounts, most mobile payments have compelling reason to adopt only if  (a) People have enough money (b) But can't find enough banks to park their money, and (c) The local regulator permits non-banks to enter the mobile payments business.

With the exception of Nigeria, Kenya and a few countries in Africa, the confluence of these factors doesn't seem to be happening anywhere else in the world. In developed markets, (a) and (c) might be applicable but (b) is not. In developing markets, roughly the reverse is true. 

No wonder mobile money has such low adoption rates in developed and developing markets alike.

While any cash-substitute transaction initiated via a mobile phone can be treated as "mobile money", it might be reasonable to associate the term "true mobile money" only to payment methods that run end-to-end on mobile networks and entirely bypass traditional card and banking rails. While Boku, Zong and other GenY Mobile Payments fit the "true mobile money" billing, Barclays' PingIt certainly doesn't, and never will, since it uses the FPS rails, which is an interbank payment network.  

Furthermore, the current version of PingIt reportedly only works if the sender and receiver are both Barclays account holders. Even future versions are expected to permit payments between people who have an account in some bank - Barclays or otherwise - that is connected to FPS. So, "non-customers"  are unlikely to be covered by PingIt - now or ever.

The way I see it, PingIt uses the mobile phone as another form factor to make interbank payments. However, while doing so, it eliminates the friction of having to enter over 100 keystrokes by way of beneficiary name, bank name, account # and sort code. Simply enter the recipient's mobile phone #, hit submit and the payment's made - in that lies PingIt's basic allure for the consumer. It might be tempting to view PingIt more expansively as "true mobile money", "financial services to the unbanked", etc. However - and I'm saying this without intending to take away any credit from Barclays for blazing this trail - such usage scenarios are outside the purview of PingIt.

Props to VocaLink. Hopefully, the new payment app will not restrict sending of payments to those who have pre-registered for the service and will follow the PayPal strategy. As many readers might recall, when PayPal launched its ePayment service over a decade ago, it went viral by not insisting that recipients must be pre-registered with PayPal. It rightly surmised that, once they receive a "you've got money" type of message, most recipients would be far more eager to sign up for the service than signing up in advance without knowing whether they'd ever get money into their account or not. IMHO, by insisting that both sender and receiver must be pre-registered for PingIt, Barclays is missing out on the opportunity to accelerate adoption.  

@SimonJ:

Thank you for taking your time out and providing a brilliant explanation for this apparent quandary around passwords for eBills. I can easily understand the risk of my eBill going to someone else because the Biller has got my email address wrong. However, IMHO database glitch is not the only cause of this. Anyway, after hearing all this, I'm led to wonder even more about whether email is a suitable medium for bills and statements except for the nomadic set.

@SimonJ:

Nice article. Wanted to check your views around passwords used in eBills. Would customer's preference for / against passwords be a valid candidate for inclusion into the preference center / table? Or, would that be dictated more by regulatory factors? As I've pointed out in the following Finextra post, I personally hate passwords. Since my eBillers don't offer me a choice to receive eBills without them - or to change the password to one of my choice - I'm left with no recourse but to insist on printed bills.

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=6106   

@BrettK: 

I share your suspicion. However, I won't blame banks totally for their stance for they face compliance challenges with KYC and social media. Of course, technologies - like Actiance Socialite about which I'd posted a blog on Finextra last year - are already available to overcome such challenges. But, when business case, ROI and other matters enter the picture, the scene does become quite hazy!

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=5241

Furthermore, take the case of a random non-customer who has nothing else to do or is engaged by a competitor. Suppose they start posting negative comments - which can even be sacrilegious lies - on a bank's FB Wall. Surely a bank cannot treat such comments as an occasion to conduct dialog? Depending upon the situation, the bank might not even be able to justify the efforts of rebutting each such comment. Shouldn't the bank have some recourse in such cases - if not to delete such comments, at least to block such people from posting on its Wall?

I hope this incident triggers off some kind of "Bill of Rights & Responsibilities" for Facebook participants - banks and their customers alike. 

My company has had good experience with RhoMobile, another cross-platform mobile apps development environment. We developed a location based task reminder which makes heavy use of smartphone features like GPS, phonebook and mapping. We could generate Android and iPhone native apps from a single code base developed over RhoMobile without changing even a single line of code. RhoMobile also claims support for WP7 although we didn't get a chance to try it out. The future of RhoMobile is somewhat unclear though - it got acquired by Motorola Mobility, which itself got acquired by Google later. 

Westpac hopefully recognizes that Facebook Wall is a feed and not an inbox. Since comments anyway tend to fade away from the FB Wall in a few hours, Westpac shouldn't find any need to delete negative comments and attract such a PR backlash. In a couple of blog posts, I've raised a few concerns about another bank's FB behavior.

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=6187

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=6213 

At the same time, I don't envy FB administrators and digital marketers of banks and other businesses their responsibility to safeguard their brand on a platform that is outside their control. Do they have any recourse if and when impostors masquerading as bank customers keep bombarding their FB Walls with false comments? One likely solution: "Premium FB Company Pages", where a company pays for a fan page in return for greater control over what happens there (e.g. "ban" such impostors from posting on the Wall).

Is Australia singled out by the media or does this kind of thing happen only there? At the risk of exaggeration, will we soon see a news headline "All ATMs and POS systems in Australia work fine today"?