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Kudos to Payments Council. This is surely a step that would increase customer confidence in and spur greater adoption of ePayments. As for Experian's claim that up to a quarter of customer references are invalid or are incorrectly formatted, I fail to understand why this figure can't be brought down considerably by implementing field-level validation logic on the reference fields of various ePayment forms. While on this subject, there's a strong need to increase the field lengths so that customers are really able to say what they want to say. After all, nobody said that ePayments and eBillPay applications should test customers' precis-writing skills, did they? I remember giving up ePayment on the Internet Banking website of a Top 5 UK bank just because the reference field was very short and I was unsure whether the payee would be able to figure out what I was paying them for!

1. Not sure about diamonds but banks in India do sell gold.
2. By the same token, an ATM is also a glorified vending machine!
3. Neither Indians nor anyone else is likely to make this work using contactless cards which have spending limits that would barely cover the cost of 1g of gold!

Interesting analogy but SAP, Oracle, JDE and other ERP leaders disrupted the incumbent best-of-breed players with their integrated MRP / MRP-II / ERP solutions. Whereas, banks are the leaders in the best-of-breed approach. Notwithstanding the benefits of making the shift, it seems far-fetched for banks to disrupt themselves by adopting an integrated approach. It would necessarily take someone else to disrupt banks' best-of-breed approach by providing integrated solutions. Financial services diversifications by retailers are probably the best bet to do this.     

My comments on prepaid cards are entirely USA-specific: (1) Prepaid cards are much more expensive than checking accounts offered free-of-cost by several credit unions and community banks (2) According to latest news, the moment prepaid cards are linked to ACH, which is a pre-requisite for using them to make bill payments, their interchange fees will be subject to the same ceilings imposed on debit cards by Frank-Dodd-Durbin. As a result, prepaid cards become less attractive for NetSpend, GreenDot and other prepaid card issuers, not just banks. When they raise their fees even further and / or eliminate eliminate ACH linkage and other features to compensate for reduced interchange revenue, prepaid cards will stop appearing as an alternative to traditional bank accounts. Sadly, whether they belong to Baby Boomers, Gen X or Gen Y generations, people won't have a choice but to stick around with traditional checking accounts, whether they understand them or not.

And, when it comes to fees, I forgot to add that banks have a lesson or two to learn from the NetSpends and GreenDots of the world. Why would someone exit a bank over a debit card usage fee when most prepaid card operators charge a fee for even balance inquiry? And, if I remember right, it was a bank - AmEx - that introduced the first fee-free prepaid card. 

I was with you all along until you brought up the subject of alternatives to banks in the end. I wish there was a choice, but, unfortunately, customers can't escape from banks. What's worse, many of them can't even escape from their present bank - as reports have pointed out, many BofA accountholders feel that they'll stick with BofA because switching banks is such a pain. I was shocked at BofA's CEO's statement that BofA's newly introduced debit card fees will actually bolster customer retention because they'll buy more products from BofA so that they can eventually be spared this fee!

Eventually, all monies on prepaid cards have to be deposited in a bank. In their present form, barring Boku, Zong and a few other niche players, mobile wallets merely store bank-card information, so they'll lose their existence without banks. PayPal freezes merchant accounts so frequently that it appears safer to move money through hawala. I'd have to undergo 100X more pain with banks before I'd even dream of PayPal as a bank-alternative. If the whipping that PayPal has been receiving from the Indian regulator is any indication, I'm not even sure if it will be around when - note, I didn't say if - banks cross the 100X pain threshold.

With multiple banking relationships in different countries and with each one having a proprietary interface (read Internet Banking portal), treasurers of large MNCs are grappling with ways to gain visibility into liquidity position on a realtime basis. By implementing state-of-the-art corporate-to-bank solutions from SWIFT, SAP, Oracle and other ERP / Treasury Management Systems vendors, they should be in a position to solve the visibility problem soon and turn to optimization subsequently. 

My prediction:

T-2 years: Grow.

T-1 year. Protect.

T-3 months. Just comply with the damn thing and make sure not to make it to the 6 o'clock news for defaulting.

(where T = deadline for compliance)

Most disasters - including ones like UBS - happen not because of too few alarms. Many risk management systems throw out too many alarms, most of which are 'false positives', and it becomes impossible for traders and other line managers to do their jobs if they have to investigate each and every alarm. This is not an excuse, but certainly an explanation, for why so many alerts from risk management systems are ignored. Insourcing or outsourcing might not matter. 

Technology has made it possible to preserve and grow organizational knowledge even if the possessor of that knowledge has moved on or the function gets outsourced. It's time regulators recognize this fact and enact regulations on the basis of outcome from processes, rather than whether they are insourced or outsourced.  

From anecdotal evidence and personal experience, I can say that CTR for ads on mobile are much higher than on PCs - ads literally come in your way and it's difficult to avoid them on a mobile! Therefore, a 0.5X lower conversion rate on mobile doesn't automatically imply double the advertising expense. IMHO, cost-benefit of ads is far more sensitive to product category and keywords than to channel.

As to method of payment, I gave up when the local regulator made 2FA mandatory for all m-commerce transactions in India. Entering one password on a mobile is painful enough - entering an OTP received via SMS and another password on VbV etc. simply became too much. 

Low percentage of consumers opting for MNO-billing is perhaps explained by its restricted availability only for purchase of virtual goods and sub US$ 10 items, which in turn owes itself to the high merchant transaction fees (as high as 40%) involved in this method of payment. Seeking to expand coverage of MNO-billing payments for larger ticket sizes, I recall a leading provider (Bong or Zoku) offering the facility to link the mobile number to credit cards.