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When my uncle, who is married for over 3 decades, had set up his Facebook page a couple of years ago, he'd quickly filled out just the mandatory fields and had intentionally left the marital status field blank. When he recently took FB's advice to complete his profile and updated his marital status to "married", all his nephews and nieces got an update saying our uncle got married. 

Today, I got an update from LinkedIn saying a business associate founded a new company. Turns out all he'd done was to expand his existing company's name on his LinkedIn profile from "XYZ" to "XYZ LLC".

Apart from a deep chuckle or two and a few raised eyebrows, the above examples are innocuous.

However, for those people planning to act on "Consider a no-employment disclosure", here's a word of caution: By itself, there's nothing wrong with this tip but, the way social media notifications work, this could result in unintended consequences. By keeping the employer field blank or removing the employer's name if it was entered earlier, I won't be surprised if social media networks send out a "so-and-so is now unemployed" type of notification to friends, followers and connections! If that happens, it could be a lot more embarrassing than my two aforementioned examples. 

The second payment clearly involved a plastic card. Had the first payment been made from a desktop / laptop, would it be called "desktop payment" or "laptop payment"? Not to rekindle old debates that took place here and here, but I submit that neither of these payments qualifies as a mobile payment.

That said, these two examples do signal the growing popularity of mobile commerce. BTW, even if the brown bag buyer is not trustworthy, there's a mobile app that can help authenticate his banknotes, thus providing one more way to popularize mobile commerce! 

Yet another reason why people shouldn't rush to ditch their "old wallets" while deliberating a move to mobile wallets!

Mobile Wallets: Fix What's Broken - And It Ain't Payments

I think it was in 2009 or so that a leading analyst drew an analogy between central payment hubs and Godot, as in Samuel Beckett's play "Waiting for Godot". Legacy aversion - and PowerPoint! - preserve the validity of the analogy five years later. Besides, as I'd highlighted in my comment here, different payment types are owned by different SBUs and have different SLAs, thus making their consolidation into a single payment hub infeasible. Furtheremore, banks could be anxious about losing revenues by processing all payments via a single hub: Regulators who are increasingly forcing banks to link fees to costs might clamp down on high (say) CHAPS fees saying, "Since your cost of processing CHAPS and FPS payments is the same, you can't charge more fees for CHAPS".

"...ensure that price rather than technology-driven speed decides...". Well, there we go: HFT was one area where banks were clearly using technology to gain competitive advantage and now the regulators are threatening to put an end to that. 

@PaulL: I'm aware of the Pine white paper but I subscribe to Ron Shevlin's conclusion: "...not all consumers need experiences or transformations."

@PaulL:

You've probably misunderstood me. 

I wasn't talking about regulation in general. I was referring to the charge of discrimination arising specifically from over-personalization of a product or service in a regulated industry like banking. As you can see from this post by Ron Shevlin, this is a real and present danger in front of banks.

Just as marketing campaigns for undifferentiated products result in low conversion and hence result in high marketing costs, overpersonalized products demand multiple campaigns and therefore have the same effect. I'm not against personalization to a certain degree. But, as I've highlighted in my company blog post To Personalize Or Not To Personalize Is The Question, 'segment of one' and such forms of personalization are neither sustainable for providers nor universally desired by customers.

At one point around 15-20 years ago, all payment cards issued in India used to have the cardholder's photo on them. Not sure when this practice stopped but, when I just checked, none of my current debit or credit cards has any picture. Not sure how many customers miss them. I for one didn't even notice it until I specifically looked them up before posting this comment. 

@MattW: I didn't know "tap" was colloquial! I've read and written it for a fairly long time. Just today, I saw it being used twice in a single article in India's leading business newspaper Economic Times about the use of SMAC technologies for election campaigning: Once to refer to Gen Y, as in "The idea is to tap them" and the second time to reference social media, as in "It is vital to tap this medium". 

According to this latest FED article about mobile payments in USA,

1. The statement "This is the year for mobile payments" has been doing the rounds for a decade.
2. Consumers are "are highly satisfied with their current payment method".
3. "Moving consumers from their current habits will require the achievement of a strategic inflection point—something that many payments industry stakeholders have tried to achieve over the years but have failed to do so."

According to this chart in the FORTUNE magazine, mobile based financial transactions account for a mere 0.01% of US GDP.

As we near the end of Q1-2014, it still doesn't look like mobile payments has entered the mainstream in USA.

While they're enabled by modern technology, highly targeted products in regulated industries like banking face business challenges related to customer privacy concerns, overdiscrimination charges from customers and regulators, high marketing costs, fulfillment difficulties, and so on. Not sure why BarclayCard took this decision but I'm guessing that one or more of the aforementioned issues played a role.