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@Louis B:

Agreed. But the alternatives are still not quite practical, which is perhaps why the post astutely stays away from making any suggestions for them.

At a large UK-based global bank, around five years ago, a newly installed executive management felt exactly the same way about their existing payments landscape as described in your post. They embarked upon a multi-year, multi-hundred-million dollar program to replace scores of legacy point systems with a single global payment hub to handle all corporate payments. Soon after, they realized that the payment hub platform they'd selected couldn't accommodate the diverse set of business processes and transaction volumes found across the globe, so they decided to break down their grand vision into separate hubs for three different markets. They then encountered political, change resistance and other organizational challenges that came in the way of accomplishing even the diluted version of their grand vision.

Long story short, five years, tens of millions of dollars and several top management separations later, some legacy systems have gone but many of them are still around. Even UK- and Europe-based corporate payments like BACS, FPS and TARGET2 don't run off a single payments hub - each needs its own landscape comprising of legacy and modern systems.

Did anyone say ROI? I seriously doubt it. All this reminds me of a two year old analyst report that drew an insightful analogy between Payment Hubs and Godot, as in the Samuel Beckett play "Waiting for Godot"!

I remember blogging about PROSPER, Zopa, CircleLending and other social media lending services way back in 2006. While their contribution to making the lending process more frictionless must be acknowledged, they don't seem to have made a significant dent to the lending business of conventional banks in the over five years of their existence. The very fact that a bank treated you the way it did unfortunately only seems to reinforce this point. Warts and all, banks don't make it obvious to my friends that I'm passing the hat around, which is a major stumbling block for Facebook and other open social networking platforms to replace banks in the lending business - not to mention risk (for the lender), regulation and a host of other factors that are still stacked heavily in favor of banks.

Talking about "Regulators and Government agencies have found it impossible to find a single group that is representative of the entire industry...", I'm reminded of a comment by the then US Defense Secretary Ronald Rumsfeld, "Whose number do I dial if I want to talk to Europe?".

But, honestly, like Europe, the industry is so large and diverse. Maybe we should be looking to create a "group of groups", somewhat like the "fund of funds" popularized by this industry!

To be, is the answer. With Actiance and NetSpend recently pointing the way, they can have their compliance cake and eat the social media one too. 

Just the other day, we heard about an Australian bank that (finally) thought of drawing inspiration for its purportedly NextGen Internet Banking website to Amazon and other leading e-commerce portals. Like I'd pointed out in a recent blog post, they're still grappling with the reality that UX is much more than eye candy. Give them a few months - maybe years, they're soooo slow, you see - and we might be able to initiate a Faster Payments transaction faster than it takes for the money to reach the other side!

As receivers of funds, charities have a lot to worry if checks are cut off and a little to do to change donor behavior, which at least currently appears overwhelmingly in favor of donating by checks. Personally, I've tried donating by many forms. While things could change from now to 2018, I find checks to be easily the most convenient instrument at this time. Unlike a utility bill where the consumer will suffer loss of service if they fail to pay on time - even if the online bill payment website has a lot friction - let's not forget that donors to charities are under no compulsion to put up with the inconvenience currently involved with non-check alternatives.  

So, the real issue here is with donors, and, by extension, the general public. Instead of asking charities to do this or that, why not poll donors for their preference? And, if this is a matter for legislation, maybe even hold a referendum among the general public?

Why not a simple SMS/email alert after each wire transfer initiated online? That's what one of my banks provides, and it seems to work just fine in alerting me to potential fraudulent activity in my company's business banking account.

Of course, it could be argued that a fraudster gaining online access to my account credentials can modify the mobile phone # / email set up for receiving alerts and thus subvert this fraud protection measure. But, the same argument applies for the proposed measure of Customer Payment Profile because, with the increasing trend towards eBAM, neither banks nor their customers are going to be pleased with a paper and wet ink based process for modifying risk limits, payment frequency and other elements of a Customer Payment Profile.

Watch Word Monitoring will help in detecting fraudulent transfers, albeit after-the-fact. From the credit card industry that has already implemented such measures, false-positives will pose a major challenge, though.  

Most implementations of overdraft protection in the US have thus far swung between two extremes: Grant overdraft against a hefty fee even when the customer hasn't asked for it, or decline overdraft even if the customer is willing to foot the bill. Props to BofA for striking the middle ground and implementing a solution at the level of the individual transaction. This also marks a victory for consumer rights protection groups who were equally critical of both the pre- and post-RegE regimes last year and have been campaigning for consumer choice at exactly this granularity since then. 

@Roy M: 

Props for pointing out the role of reference data in liquidity risk management.

To stretch the Le Carre reference, hope the survey you quoted makes data stewards "A Most Wanted Man" in payments shops. In a recent blog post, I'd narrated my experience of the acute risk caused to a bank's liquidity positon when a new processing software insisted upon 11-character BIC codes whereas the legacy feeder software could only supply 8-character ones.  

The above experience also showed that, apart from dirty data, technical stability of the payments landscape should become "The Mission Song" for payments shops in order to manage liquidity risk appropriately.

The last 2-3 years have seen the emergence of a few cross-platform mobile app development environments. A quick Google Search exposes standards and products like Application Markup Language (AML), Rhomobile, PhoneGap, etc. Click here for a comparison. 

Banks wanting to acquire the 'early mover' advantage and yet hedge their bets on the shifting popularity of various mobile operating systems can develop a single codebase under one of these development environments and deploy them on multiple models of mobile phones with little or no code change. 

While 100% cross-platform might seem a very lofty goal, our recent experience has been encouraging: We were able to deploy a single version of a location based app on an iPhone and two different models of Android phone without any code change. Any difference observed in the behavior of the app could be clearly attributed to the differences in specs of the hardware. For example, the app is able to track locations indoor in an iPhone and in one of the two Android models but not in the other, reflecting the difference in the power of GPS across these models.