Community

@Anon:

1. I don't remember the exact figures but I think the total addressable market of card transactions in USA is US$ 5T per year. According to rumors, Apple will get 20 bps of transaction value for carrying out authentication. That translates to > US$ 10B of fee income, which I'm guessing will be significant even for a giant of the size of Apple.
2. I'm no great enthusiast of replacing plastic but, as mobile wallets go, Apple Pay is easily the best, for reasons I'd highlighted in https://www.finextra.com/blogs/Fullblog.aspx?blogid=9924.  
3. With just 220K merchants out of a total of 10M card accepting merchants in USA currently equipped to accept Apple Pay, one of the two Venn diagrams is itself tiny!
4. Apple is claiming that Apple Pay is *more secure than plastic*. Given the company's stature, I expect maximum translation limits to soon apply to plastic!

Per this BI article, the Starbucks App numbers are even higher: 6M transactions / week and 15% share. However, growth rate in transaction volume has drastically dropped from 25% to 10% during the last 2 quarters. Even accounting for a slight drop in revenues during this period, this suggests that the adoption of the app has hit saturation point. Which is a pity considering it's still not used by 85% of Starbucks' customers.

Personally, mobile apps are great for ordering and foster loyalty when they stick to mobile commerce. The moment they start supporting payments, too many other things enter the picture and complicate matters viz. hardening, 2FA, signal strength, battery life, and so on. More often than not, in the resultant tradeoff between security and convenience, the app begins to put off customers and starts to engender disloyalty. 

In my personal experience during 2000-2004, it was fairly normal for many merchants in Germany to decline "anything other than debit cards or cash" - including a large electronics retailer that declined its own co-branded credit card that it had issued "purely for branding purposes"! I'm surprised that the same is still true a decade later. Maybe they will skip the plastic credit card era and leapfrog directly to mobile wallet based credit cards!

For over 2 years, midsize and large banks in the region have been using various social intelligence platforms to mine social media chatter for upsell, cross-sell, customer service and to ringfence dissatisfied customers from their competitors. Will be interesting to watch MasterCard's target market and use cases.

@JoL + 1. The really big ticket nefarious activities happen via wire transfers thru' the banking system. While I've read about this in fiction novels, it sounds plausible since (a) it's physically impossible to move 10M in cash from Zurich to Turk & Caicos in real time (which is what happened in the latest of such novels I just finished reading last week) (b) a couple of banks have been fined billions for facilitating such nefarious transactions. In this day and age, I'm amazed at how some people stick to the quaint notion that cash (or cryptocurrrency) must mean illicit activity and / or tax evasion and that banking system must mean legitimate activity and / or tax compliance.

Not sure what the average monthly rent is but assuming it to be as low as GBP 250 since the context is "social housing", the share of the online+mobile channel can be worked out as follows:   

• 8500 properties
• Total rent collection per month: GBP 2.125M (8500*250)
• Total rent collection for last 8 months: GBP 17M (2.125M*8)
• Of which rent collection by Online+Mobile channels: GBP 100000.
• Therefore, Online+Mobile Income as % of Total Income: 100000/17M = 0.6%

Not sure if there's a typo somewhere but, as things stand, the Online+Mobile channel accounts for less than 1% of the company's income. Any idea how it has managed to become "vitally important" to Salix Homes?

Looks like banks' efforts at staying profitable have been very successful. According to this WSJ article, the sector's profits are at near record levels. 

http://online.wsj.com/articles/u-s-banking-industry-profits-racing-to-near-record-levels-1407773976

P2P lending portals that are known for using social media and other signals mentioned by you to supplement / replace traditional credit scores still seem to be struggling to attract custom, going by recent reports that they're seeking regulation to even source customers whose loan applications are rejected by banks (https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=9939). Any idea why there's such a big difference between theory and reality?

People with middle names have been believed to be more creditworthy for a long time. The unnamed Big Data scoring service provider referenced by you is recycling very old news.  

The possibility you've surmised on a "funny note" may not be so far-fetched after all: In the early 2000s, a leading American consulting company mandated that all its employees worldwide must have a middle name or at least a middle initial. In countries like UK where middle names are not a common practice, an "X" was inserted as the dummy middle initial! 

@ParamdeepS:

If I had a penny for everytime I read "passwords will be history", I'd be a three-time millionaire - with the first and second million coming from "cash will be history" and "plastic (credit cards) will be history" respectively!

Jokes apart, using only one device for accessing everything sounds ideal but it's neither desirable nor practical. Not desirable because it goes against the basic principle of security, which dictates that things with different degree of sensitivity must be secured by access control mechanisms of different strengths. Not practical because, even if we somehow hand out such devices to everyone, the cost of installing readers everywhere to read those devices is simply too prohibitive. I was alluding to this in my comment about NFC-smartphone-employee-ID not fulfilling all purposes to which physical cards are put to today. Similarly, while Aadhar cards may be issued to >500M Indians, I haven't come across a single Aadhar card reader that can scan fingerprints to authenticate an Aadhar card holder.    

I'm intrigued when you say fingerprint is "not secure enough". If that's the fate of the outcome of decades of work, there's little hope for newfangled - and somewhat harebrained  - biometric 'factors' like EKG / hearbeat (https://www.finextra.com/community/members/PreviewDComment.aspx?dc_id=12081).

Some may argue that the world has still not even reached the stack era. I still remember the fanfare with which ISO-OSI 7 layer stack model was launched. Meant to supersede the inefficient / insecure TCP/IP standard, OSI was supposed to revolutionize networking and set new standards for datacom. Then we all know what happened: Internet, using TCP/IP. Many decades have passed. TCP/IP still dominates networking. That said, let's see if block supersedes TCP/IP.