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The findings of this study resonate well with the ground reality found in many banking software development and testing engagements. Vendors think it's the bank's responsibility to mask customer information before handing it over to them (i.e. vendors) whereas this study raises an interesting point about the responsibility for masking data lying with vendors. Tight deadlines, ignorance of this issue among project staff, and other contributing factors will likely continue, as will the non-involvement of non-project experts. Looks like a viable solution to the problem is unlikely to come from inside banks or vendors. 

As a previous thread of Finextra blogs and comments pointed out, there's a lot of opaqueness around how the beneficiary will be able to utilize the funds received on their Visa card a/c - viz. pay down future debit balances, transfer to bank a/c, withdraw as cash, and so on, and the charges for doing so. Hope FiServ / CashEdge throw some light. 

If payment will happen only later in the year, it's only logical that the credit card should be valid at the time. How else will the card issuer collect the money in case the card isn't renewed? Wonder why the payment can't be taken out right away from the credit card account - after all, that's the same as asking people to use the alternative mode of prepaid card.

Not sure if I'm missing anything but, to me, this sounds more like a cross-selling campaign for Visa Prepaid rather than a processing glitch in credit card!

@Brett:

Good that you brought up Encyclopedia Brittanica, Blockbuster, Borders, Newspaper, Video Casette, and CD-ROM to paint the doomsday scenario for plastic credit cards and debit cards, since that provides a good context with which to analyze the impact of mass adoption of mobile payments - regardless of if and when it happens.

Wikipedia could go all out to herald the decline of Encyclopedia Brittanica; likewise, Amazon, of Borders and NetFlix, of Blockbuster; and so on. Whereas, most mobile payments as of now rely on the underlying credit / debit card account, and merely seek to supplant the plastic form factor. Even Zong, which originally launched as a pure play mobile payment method operating solely via a TELCO-billing model decided to add credit card as an alternative funding mechanism in order to boost adoption and scale up ticket sizes.  

To me, this means in short, no credit card / debit card, no mobile payments.  So, at least in their present avatar, mobile payments can only lead to en-masse replacement of of magstripe and chip-and-PIN POS terminals by NFC terminals at merchant premises, which doesn't mean doom for credit and debit cards. This is unlike an alternative payment method like PayPal - if everyone had PayPal and bank accounts, they could fund their PayPal accounts via their bank accounts and transfer money to one another via PayPal, and there would be no need for credit or debit cards, in plastic, mobile or any other form factor.

@Robert S: As Scobleizer's example about "Android sales" comment illustrates, the value of a comment to readers does depend upon the commenter's locus-standi. 

@Matt W: In addition to the two options, "Post anonymously" and "Post as me", it might help to add another option "Post anonymously but reveal identity if more than x readers demand it". This might slightly complicate matters but it could strike the ideal middle-ground between the expectations of readers and commenters. 

@Matt W:

...with one key difference:

With Slate/TechCrunch and most other blogs, anonymous means anonymous-anonymous in the sense neither readers nor website owners know the identity of the commenter who doesn't have to log on to get inside a walled garden in order to post comments. This is not the case with Finextra, where mandatory login prior to posting comments unmasks commenter's identity at least to the website owner. 

Branch or digital channel is a vibrant debate.

My only request to banks is, if you're going to invest in branches, please do so whole-heartedly: When I visit a branch, don't ask me to call PhoneBanking - as one or two of your ilk do now!

Chris: 

A small field for a programmer, but a giant record...

As its name suggests, BIC is expected to identify a bank, and it seems to do that quite well. As far as I know, BIC wasn't envisaged to identify non-banking business identities, and it should continue to serve its purpose even after IBEI/LEI come into existence.  

Y2K, the most famous/notorious of these field-related changes, illustrated that data standard change initiatives gather steam only when the doomsday is just around the corner. Unless I'm missing something, that's not the case for BIC/IBEI/LEI.

@Keith:

Your example about limitations in Payroll Systems reminds me of this interesting story in The Partners, the book about Goldman Sachs, which talks about the huge disparity in state of technology across different parts of the famous investment banking firm. Even while its trading systems could do HFT in milliseconds, its payroll system couldn't print a check/cheque above USD 10,000!   

Having observed up close the trials and tribulations that a company went through in working out a unified BlackBerry contract for its employees across 8-10 countries in Europe - each with its own language and local clauses - your solution sounds interesting. 

If we put eInvoicing within the larger perspective of the order-to-cash cycle of an enterprise, I just can't shrug off the feeling that its core value proposition is questionable: Sure, it can bring down DSO by a few days, but does it really matter when many typical CFOs and VP-Sales believe that the bulk of DSO is caused simply by customers refusing to pay on time? 

While a single standard always helps in theory, it generally happens only after mass-adoption of a certain technology. Besides, multiple standards never deterred the mass adoption of many technologies with strong value proposition, for example, Internet (OSI/ISO v. TCP/IP), Instant Messaging (lack of interoperability between, say, MSN and GTalk), and ERP (SAP iDoc v. Oracle EBS' XML-based document standard). 

In this context, the recent annnouncement of Intuit Payments Network (IPN) is an encouraging development. By coupling eInvoicing with ePayments, Intuit propels the value proposition of IPN to the next level, which might just be the tipping point in B2B e-invocing and e-payments technologies.