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Yes, the Optima machines are tuned to handle both EMV cards and ITSO passes.

Swindon-based Almex, part of Hoeft & Wessel Group, has won the £18 million contract to supply the ticket machines using its Optima BL machines.

Have a look again at the opening salvos between Tom Watson and the Murdochs. Rupert seemed to be playing the 'Alzheimer's defence' employed so skillfully by Ernest Saunders during the Guinness trials - while at the same time using James as a human shield and willing scapegoat. He appeared to regain his faculties as the hearing went on and it became apparent that the rest of the Select Committee were throwing paper darts. As for James, he said a lot while at the same time saying nothing at all. Look at him squirming over the Sun on Sunday question. Either way, it's a massive failure of corporate governance.

Oops, embarassing boo-boo fixed. In mitigation, almost the entire Finextra team de-camped to Madrid for the week for EBAday, leaving yours truly to handle the rest of the world. I'm booking myself into rehab this weekend.

PayDivvy? With a name like that, you can guarantee this wouldn't work in the UK.

The Bank of Google anyone?

I remember working on a monthly banking magazine (remember them?) twenty years ago and getting a letter from a reader who was looking for information on implanting bank chip cards in the brain. That was filed under N for...guess what?

Anyway, now we have Larry Page, co-founder of Google burbling to Cnet about having Google brain implants: "On the more exciting front, you can imagine your brain being augmented by Google. For example you think about something and your cell phone could whisper the answer into your ear."

And that was back in March.

As far as we understand it, the TSU was initially intended to deal with bank-to-bank elements of trade finance, while Bolero managed the bank-to-corporate side.

Historically, Bolero acted as a supplier of technology and supported the initial development of the TSU. Before the TSU service became commercially available, Swift took full responsibility for the application and all future support, maintenance and enhancements, and Bolero was effectively sidelined. At the same time, Swift muddied the waters further by opening bank-sponsored corporate access to the network.

We're still not entirely clear about the relationship going forward, which is why we asked Swift for a comment. We're still waiting to hear back from them.

Insisting that staff 'unfriend' friends who may have been less than generous in their comments about the bank seems a bit over-zealous to me.

The real value of the Starbucks app may not be in the number of seconds it knocks off transaction times (or whether it's safer or easier than cash), but in the visbility it brings to the mobile experience.

With a Starbucks on every street corner, the chain is bringing mobile payments out of the techie labs and debating chambers and putting it front and centre to millions of ordinary punters every day.

In this way, Starbucks is helping to shape opinion and shift perceptions, but let's not get over-excited - it's just one of an array of options presented to the consumer. And in the early stages, I suspect it will have a limited appeal only to a minority tech-savvy user demographic.