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From Michael Lewis's book on the recent crisis, "The Big Short", it would appear that the required technology was in place, the red flags were raised by the risk management people, but traders were still allowed to - at least not prevented from - doing CDO trades that resulted in huge losses for their companies.  Was this because traders - and their bosses - earn bonus only if they put through trades and not when they refrain from doing so? IMHO, presence or absence of technology won't play any role in preventing or precipitating future crises - only deferrment of bonus and other similar measures can help. 

Makes me wonder what would happen if the other sponsors took a cue from VISA and insisted that all spectators must wear only <Adidas/Nike/...> shoes, drink only <Coke/Pepsi/...>, etc.! On the other hand, if, as the report indicates, VISA has gotten away at all Olympics since 1988, its stand can't be so evil after all!

TransFS is a well known American comparison shopping service that helps SMB merchants find the cheapest credit card processing account. To beat the problem of lack of transparency pointed out in this article, TransFS only compares processors who quote on an Interchange Plus basis, so that merchants clearly know how much they are paying toward interchange fees versus for other value-added services.

Excellent article. Non-banks like Revolution Money launched competing schemes with a flat 0.5% interchange fee. Probably, they found that rate so unsustainable and had to sell out to Amex? 

Congratulations Finextra! I've been your regular reader for the past six years and look forward to continue reading Finextra well into the future. Finextra serves as a beacon for technology professionals for establishing similar communities and resources in telecom, retail and other technology-intensive industries. Best wishes for the Next 10!

From my days of being Program Director for Faster Payments at a Top 3 bank in 2007-2008, I remember a Top 3 TELCO in the UK asking the bank NOT to enable its collection account for Faster Payments from the go live date in May 2008. We were all surprised to hear that the TELCO didn't want its money earlier! While damaged payment reference information could be one reason, there was a different factor at work in this specific case: apparently, the TELCO's existing application that swept its collection account to spot receipts and credit them to respective customer accounts couldn't work in realtime. It appears that there are still many such applications around a full two years after FPS went live! 

Kudos to ING Direct USA for launching this online calculator as an innovative way to point out the high cost of overdraft fees levied by other banks. By permitting overdrafts, albeit without any fees, ING Direct is letting customers have their overdraft and eat it too! However, before customers rush to open the Electric Orange account with ING Direct USA on which this calculations are based, they should check out the maximum overdraft amount and term allowed by ING Direct as well as the comparitive costs for those figures. For example, for an overdraft amount of $5000 for 30 days, this calculator reveals that ING Direct's charges at $29.79 are not much lower than the $30 charged by other banks. While the calculator does not accept amounts over $5000 or a period that is higher than 30 days, it doesn't take a PhD in mathemticals to realize that its charges are higher than that of other banks if such higher figures were permitted in the actual account.

After trying to get banks and financial institutions to adopt Web 2.0 technologies for over a year, I can easily appreciate your viewpoint. At the same time, if we look at it from a another perspective, the reluctance of banks has actually led to a new crop of third-party providers offering such functionality. For example, Offermatic is a newly launched website that parses through your credit and debit card transactions and makes offers that are highly personalized to you - a feature that I see in your wishlist. Maybe the banking industry is just following the footsteps of the software industry - there are so many companies doing quite well with Windows and Office add-on products that do little more than plug gaps left by Microsoft.

Hope the cash dispenser manufacturer doesn't get sued by the bank and car owners - after all, they caught the flak only because the cash dispenser proved to be "bomb-proof"!

When Wal-Mart tried to drive RFID technology in the retail industry a few years ago, it resulted in a lot of buzz but nowhere near 100% adoption even several years after its original deadline has passed. It remains to be seen how much impact its current call for EMV is going to make in the USA. But, one thing is for sure: a moniker like "bandaid" solutions from someone like Wal-Mart threatens the prospects of nuBridges and other providers of E2EE and Tokenization solutions.