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Wonder if Google suddenly realized that PayPal has added more and more functionality to its platform without making much noise - like I did when when I was recently trying to enable my company GTM360's website to accept credit card payments - and decided on a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach. 

From my past knowledge of PayPal, for a merchant to accept PayPal always meant that the payer had to have a PayPal account, which obviously limits its adoption. Only during my recent exercise did I learn that this is not the case. When I heard this, I stopped my search for a suitable merchant account provider and opted for PayPal instead. While PayPal might be costlier and provide less than exemplary service, it was an easy choice to make. If my behavior is representative of the average consumer's, it surely makes it that much more difficult for PayPal's competitors to make much headway against it.    

If they became as simple as writing a cheque, e-payments will automatically see a lot more adoption by the man on the street - there's no need for any government subsidies.

When many EU governments - Social Security in Germany, HM Revenue in the UK, to name a few - insist on using snail-mail for any letter that contains Personally Identificable Information (PII), I don't see why I should be slapped a penalty if I don't want to accept bills and invoices electronically.  

SEPA for cross-border is fine. But, I hope regulators seriously rethink their plans to mandate SEPA for domestic payments. There's already talk of making UK's Faster Payments available on mobile phones in a simplified manner in which Immediate Mobile Payments can be made using just the mobile number of the beneficiary. In this day and age, isn't it a bit retrograde to ask consumers to move from the already tedious 10-12 digit account numbers and 6-8 digit sort codes to an even more cumbersome SEPA regime that asks them to enter 20+ character IBAN numbers and 8+ character BIC codes for domestic payments?

Ironic as it might sound in the backdrop of all the chatter from banks about the adverse impact of regulation, the fact is retail banks are being protected from disintermediation by regulation - at least in India.

In the case of Nokia Money in India, fact is banks - or a specific one called YES Bank - is an integral part of the process flow. No YES Bank, no Nokia Money - it's as simple as that. According to India's banking regulator, at least one of the two parties in a Nokia Money transaction - sender or receiver - must have a YES Bank account, for non-banks are barred by law from taking deposits in India.

It could be argued that such regulation is stifling innovation, but the fact is, they're protecting disintermediation of banks from the retail banking market. It could be predicted that regulators in emerging countries will become more liberal over time, which would accelerate the disintermediation of banks. That's somewhat unlikely because most of them are publicly applauded for insulating their economies from the Great Recession by following conservative policies.

Hope this outsourcing service from SWIFT is mindful of non-English names containing acute, grav, umlaut and other accent symbols, and provides not only an original version of the name that retains the accent symbol but also a pure-English equivalent wherein the accents are substituted with their correct alternatives. For example, it should list Mu(umlaut)ller in the original German form and the pure-English equivalent of Mueller. If this crucial step is left outside the scope of the outsourcing system, banks having systems with English-only capabilities will tend to omit the umlaut symbol altogether, thus incorrectly converting the name to Muller, which could result in a True Negative (posing compliance risks) or a False Positive (leading to lost revenue and customer dissatisfaction).

Given that IBAN+BIC required for SEPA contains more than twice the number of characters when compared to BBAN+SortCode required under legacy systems, it appears that SEPA for domestic payments would entail an explosion in field lengths of bank account related fields. It would be interesting to know if this study contains any data around the field lengths currently supported by typical corporate payment processing applications. If they are not easily extensible to the larger sizes demanded by SEPA, we could be looking at a migration exercise that could rival Y2K in its scope and cost.

I agree with much of what Keith says. At the same time, virtually all issues applicable to SEPA were equally well applicable to EURO and yet so many countries adopted the single currency. I think what's principally different with SEPA is the added complexity - ex: such a long IBAN account number - which poses almost-insurmountable hurdles to its everyday use for local payments.

Even as far back as two years ago, I faced no problems using contactless cards at a Pret A Manger, Krispy Kreme and a couple of other Canary Wharf stores located in the 500 meter radius of Barclays' HQ building. Their attendants were well educated on contactless card readers and point-of-sale equipment.

Like charity, maybe training also begins at home and diminishes in intensity the farther you go from the center!

The author has hit the nail on the head by saying that "... the ingredients are the resources, and the environment is the organisation, these ... are certainly not standardised from project to project". This explains why standardized methodologies have limited use in the actual delivery of most projects.

At the same time, project owners grappling with the challenges caused by the non-standard nature of resources and organization in the AS-IS scenario tend to lean on methodologies to forcibly bring about their standardization during the implementation and in the TO-BE scenario.

This probably explains why, despite limited success stories of use of methodologies in projects of any scale, methodologies continue to remain a "necessary", if not "sufficient", criteria in the selection of consulting firms.

Props to Deutsche Bank for introducing this forum. If only other banks follow suit - including a couple where I have accounts - I can share a few new product ideas.