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@JohnD:

I've personally interacted with Marion King while leading the consortium that included VocaLink and implemented FPS for a Top 5 UK Bank. Against this backdrop, I fully agree with your views about her. Best wishes to her and to the incoming CEO David Yates in their respective future endeavors. 

I've read several reports saying that the market for P2P is at least two orders of magnitude lower than that for P2B, so banks might not be interested in P2P in the first place due to their higher cost structure stemming from risk management and other compliance costs. As for P2B, I think banks have done a lot already by way of implementing online bill payment solutions on Internet Banking. Online bill pay seems to be very popular, given that many customers have already set up recurring mandates on their bank websites and find the cost of switching to another bank quite high. 

As a merchant, I'm not a great fan of PayPal. However, this survey refers to consumers. Based on my personal experience of using PayPal as a consumer to make payments, let me put some facts straight as I see them: 

1. In close to 10 years of using PayPal as a consumer, I've never ever seen my account go dormant despite long periods of non-usage to make payments.  
2. Most horror stories are of PayPal merchant - not consumer - accounts getting frozen.  
3. While merchants get Seller Protection only on rare occasion, consumers almost always get Buyer Protection when they pay with PayPal. As a matter of fact, PayPal uses the latter point to justify why it needs to inspect sales transactions frequently, which is often an euphemism for freezing merchant accounts. 

If banks have to take the permission of Apple and Google to get mobile banking apps on to their own customers' smartphones, it's only fair that Google should face a similar situation with Verizon and other MNOs with its Google Wallet app. Either both practices invoke antitrust concerns or neither does.   

During the course of community testing a QR code product, we found that almost one in three people below the age of 30 has a smartphone, whereas the corresponding figure among 30+ is less than 10%. While these numbers are different in the absolute, they're directionally similar to the ones quotes in your article. 

At the same time, we hardly found any mobile banking apps on these smartphones despite all leading banks offering them for over a year. To me, this suggests that GenY and digital natives don't feel compelled to behave equally digitally with everyone. Maybe it's because banks enjoy some sort of "father figure" stature with the common man, at least in India, but if a bank says "you must visit the branch to submit your identity and proof documents", everyone including GenY tends to obey those instructions without kicking up a major fuss.

Which is why I'm not so sure that banks can get so easily sidelined by innovative providers - assuming regulators permit them to enter the financial services market - just on the basis of mobile banking services.

@BoH: Wow, that's great! Over how many years has this happened? 

Most forms of ePayments (e.g. FPS) use bank sort code in addition to account number and other details. While BANP may let someone retain their account number as they switch banks, won't SIPs and STOs need to be changed to reflect the new BSC? If that be the case, I'm not sure how a switcher can avoid reissuing standing orders, BANP or no BANP.

'ATM machines that allow cash and check deposit in realtime' - good to know that CBA has the pulse of the market and is investing in new technologies to make ongoing improvements to traditional payment instruments. Old as they are, cash and checks are far from obsolete in many parts of the world. 

If you don't feel safe using your NFC / contactless mobile / card at Krispy Kreme (is it still around in Canary Wharf?), you can always go and buy your coffee at Starbucks or elsewhere and pay with cash. However, you obviously don't have any choice with your mass transit provider. This might explain why politicians might want to err on the side of caution when it comes to TfL.  

In his book "The Big Short", Michael Lewis says that rating agencies are filled with people who tried but couldn't get into mainstream Wall Street firms, and therefore that it was very easy for these bankers to game the rating agencies. Two years ago, in a post titled "Credit Rating Agencies & The Financial Meltdown" in my personal blog, I'd written, "In this subprime mortgage caused financial meltdown, public opinion accuses some players of abject greed and others of downright fraud. But incompetence is a charge perhaps reserved only for credit rating agencies." Recent incidents seem to reinforce this point. 

I've read somewhere that CRAs came into existence when government bond issuers wanted to outsource their obligation towards assuring asset quality. Given that background, it'd be interesting to see your prediction "Soon companies in the credit rating business will be regulated" coming true - it'd amount to a sort of "reverse outsourcing"!