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Think about check-in/out at toll ports without taking your phone from your ear (during call) or getting your phone out of your pocket, but just by a flick of the wrist. Quite curious whether the NFC chip is single-provider (in this case Visa) only or can support multiple providers. In case of the latter you need to be able to load new accounts on the chip, e.g. via an App that runs on a phone that communicates via NFC with the watch. App is provided by the TMS that operates the chip in the watch.

People who are for some time in the corporate banking business may remember Identus (without 't' at the end) that was initiated by a group of global tier 1  banks (http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Identrus). The main purpose was to enable trusted business-to-bank and business-to-business data exchange with financial institutions as the key trust providers. Besides exchanging payment orders, account statements, etc. with banks this facility could also be used to exchange data, such as quotes, orders, invoices, etc., with trading partners and other parties in the supply chain in a trustful manner. The beauty of the concept was that a busines only needed one credential, savely stored on a bank provided samrt card, to exchange data with any other party connected to the Identrus service. Great concept and idea, but the service was too expensive for the businesses to get widely adopted. That was much related to the state of technology in those days. The needs have not disappeared, and have even grown as the need to seamless machine-to-machine data exchange is only growing. With blockchain a technology has emerged that can implement the great concept of Identrus in a much more cost efficient manner so that cost is not a blocking factor anymore.

@Kevin. This depends on the situation in a specific country. In the Netherlands (from a payments perspective comparable with Denmark), debit card fees to be paid by merchants are lower than the fees to collect and deposit cash (not mentioning the time it takes of the merchant to collect/deliver cash and the security risks of holding cash). Following your arguments, merchants in countries like the Netherlands and Denmark should be able to refuse cash on the customer's behalf (otherwise the customer is going to pay for the relatively expensive cash handling fees of the bank).

Having said this, I'm aware that my argument does not apply for other countries where the situation around banking fees for different payment instruments differs. I'm convinced that in the future, due to the decline of electronic payment fees, more countries will get in the same situation as the Netherlands and Denmark.

Lu, David,

I subscribe your conclusions. Bear in mind that with NFC coming up the average value of a transaction will significantly decrease. A debit card transaction of 5 euro will result in an interchange fee of 1 cent. I wonder at the end of the day what will result in the highest average interchange fee (incorporated in the merchant fee) for the merchant, a percentage 0f 0.2% or a fixed fee of 5 cent. May be someone else has a view on this?

I´m curious to the responses/answers to the following question :

Which new payment scheme is expected to get the reach and mass adoption so that it can become a real thread for the established (legacy) ones?

Wow. MS DOS for mobile ;-).

I fully agree with Alexander's assessment on SE and HCE in his opening comment. What suprises me though is that value of SE/HCE is only put in context of NFC (payments). There is a huge economic value to be gained from the use of SE/HCE for other security related purposes like authentication, digital signatures, KYC and secure embedded transactions in mobile Apps as well as the internet. The value it can deliver ranges from new revenue streams, operational efficiencies, fraud reduction amongst others. In addition the convenience for the end user improves strongly which stimulates the acceptance and usage. I think the economic value is that big that more involvement from governments is involved to open up the technology for mass usage. A first good step is regulation that eliminates the obstacles with respect to the access to the SE (which was addressed by Alexander with his comment ´... if mobile operators did not stand in the way´).

Hi Dave and Alex,

I agree with Alex's comments on authentication and UX. So comments from my side to make the discussion even more lively. I´m wondering how PSD2 is going to influence this ´API´ topic (as it is expected to force the banks to open their accounts for 3rd party PSPs by exposing an API). I also believe that HCE (host card emulation) in Android has the potential to become this authentication interface where Alex was refering to. Although HCE has recently become available, there are already interesting showcases like Sabadell and PayPal. If it is, I´m quite interested in the responses of Apple and Microsoft.

Hi Andrew,

I fully agree with you that there is still a enormous value to be leveraged from SEPA by corporates. Several years ago I published an article on this which is according to your statements still very actual and valid (http://www.gtnews.com/Articles/2007/SEPA_s_Impact_on_the_Financial_Supply_Chain.html).

Would it be possible that European banks are planning a mobile only payments scheme that has a more cost effective setup than the traditional card processing infrastructures and gives them new business opportunities in the future? If that is the case, the biggest challenge I foresee for such an initiative is to come to an agreement on interoperable standards (which tends to take long) and the implementation of these standards at the checkout (cash register or POS) while the time to act is short as the competition won´t stand still.