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Why is this seen as being for developing countries?  Why not use M-PESA in Glasgow or Cornwall?  As the Right Honourable gentleman says, why trap poor people in cash-only economies?  I think that we should be looking at technology like this to revitalise retail financial services in the UK.

"Look at the fraud figures, we are going to see a dramatic increase"

While this is true Griff, I don't want to be so defeatist! There's a plan B that I'm waiting to reveal... oh go on then... turn off the contact interfaces in the terminals and make them contactless only.  Since the contactless cards in Europe are DDA by mandate, and since the hosts (as far I can see so far) implement the crypto properly, this ought to make a decent dent in the fraud figures!!

"These withdrawals took place in the UK"

Were these withdrawals at bank ATMs or at "stand alone" ATMs in pubs or something like that?

I think you've misunderstood how the system might work.  In other, more advanced economies (eg, Lebanon, Hungary) you get a text message whenever your card is used for transactions above a certain threshold.

Surely the problem is that banking and payments need to become more separate, so that innovation in payments in not linked to innovation in bankign.

"Does 10 days to get your new Blackberry working and synchronised with your enterprise email system, and getting your old phone contacts into the new phone sound familiar to anyone?"

Yes.  That's why I got an iPhone.  Even Microsoft Exchange only took 3 minutes to set up.