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Given that Barclays have publically stated they have taken inspiration from mPesa for Pingit, I think the comment has some validity. I'm agree that anyone working in the payments industry would say that that the Vocalink proposal is nothing like mPesa, but I have not doubt that the the press will make the comparison. 

How many people would even even start to comprehend what "an extension of the pre-existing online A2A transaction type to the mobile phone form factor" unless they work in payments? None I suspect. 

But ultimatly, what is the Vocalink system if not a cash transfer albeit from a debit account, to another debit account? It's cash being moved under a different name. So actually, there is some valid comparison to M-Pesa and I agree with the original comment in that respect. 

Isn't this a bit late? I thought this was meant to happen this year and now we are told it's next year. THere are lot of questions being asked about the security and reliability of the system and whether the size of the database that is going to be big enough. 

Why is is taking so long? The lukcy peopke in Kenya have had a similair servivce for 6 years now and yet, here, we still wait for what will I suspect given the actors involved, a cumbersome, over engineered, costly servive that no-one really wants and when it does lauch will be lost in it's irelevance. 

Surely, given the recent investigation on the UK MNO JV, this has to be referred to the EU Competition Commision? I cannot believe that Google, Paypal etc are happy with this and won't file a complaint. 

Intersting.. not the least because Vodafone have signed a global deal with Visa and here the Italians are using MasterCard (or MasterCrad as the typo says).

Take one phone, that has been designed to look the best in the world. It's lightweight, elegant,. stylish. Then add a case that weighs as much if not more than the phone and is thicker, clunkier.. seems to defeat the point really. 

And not sure they mentioned "mobile payments" in the article. Have you seen many merchants take Pingit? Whilst it is available, I've yet to actually make a Pingit payment to a merchant whilst I have used my phone and a contactless card to make many purchases. 

It's just an eCommerce transaction. But.. they have no fees?? So where is the revenue? If I offer a service that has no fees, no setup costs, no interchange then the chances are I will not be offering this service at this level for very long. 

Seen today .,.

Figures from Visa show contactless payments accounted for one in six under £20 transactions across all the Olympic venues. Visa installed 3,000 contactless terminals in the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic venues.

Mark Austin, Visa's head of contactless, said: "We are pleased with consumers' response to the technology and have gained many useful insights that will help make contactless a commonplace payment method."

So, not sure if that is a success or not. Visa are pleased to I guess they coinsider it a success which is a key as they paid a lot for the right. 

Going back to the orginal post, a recent article that seem to contradict the content of the post. 

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/saving/article-2188142/Lack-appetite-tap-bank-cards-fraud-concerns.html - This is based on research from BankMachine, who of course do also have a website called cash-is-cool.com so, to saythe least, they are pretty biased (and indeed just looking at other articles it seems that Bank Machine appear a lot in negative articles on Contactless payments).

Then of course, this appears today http://www.nfcworld.com/2012/08/16/317281/gartner-places-nfc-in-trough-of-disillusionment/ and we see that NFC payments are 5-10 years away so hopefully the Brazil Olympics will be a better reflection of adoption than London. 

@MattW He is aware that I am a dissenter.. in the same way, I do not believe stickers are the future either!

I think the point should also be made that Visa had removed many of the cash machines or switched them to only accept Visa cards. Where there were usually 50 machines, suddenly there were only 8 and the access to cash was very limited. But this was the only real event that caused a major issue and it would seem that, whilst not all food outlets accepted cards (surely an error on the side of LOCOG, Visa etc), those that did worked well. 

I think that cash will never be replaced and will always retain it's place in our pocket, wallet, purse etc. In the same way that a phone will never fully replace a card - the form factor is just to convinient.