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Many people - including me - tend to use different, lower cost SIMs while traveling abroad. GPS is not very reliable indoors. Because it drains battery rapidly, some people - including me - keep GPS switched off except while using the smartphone for navigation. These are formidable hurdles in front of proximity correlation. Against that backdrop, the only way I can bring myself to believe that this technology has "slashed the number of 'false positives' on overseas transactions by up to 70%" is if the bank simplistically rejected all overseas transactions as being fraudulent. Personally, I find 2-way SMS Alerts to be a more reliable yet lower cost solution.

The calculations in my post about "Zero Cash Day" were based on the (falling) share of cash as a method of payment. I'd ignored reports stating that the absolute volume of cash in circulation has actually been growing over the past few years, assuming that the trend would be short-lived. Looks like my assumption is wrong: According to this gtnews article, the rise in the number of banknotes is expected to continue "through to at least 2022". Nothing temporary about that. The article also describes some new technology designed to help help retailers and other businesses cope up with the rising volume of cash. Quite frankly, a lot of that sounded more innovative than mobile payments, at least in as far as they solve real world problems.

Talking of which, Vodafone India finally launched M-PESA and I signed up for it around 10 days ago. At the time of signing up, I'd submitted at least 3 different types of documents for Proof of Identity. Today, I received an SMS saying that I need to submit some more KYC documents before my account would be activated. With so much friction in onboarding, I'm not sure if M-PESA will ever gain mainstream adoption in India.

The problems with offshoring are not new. Nor are the perceived advantages of near shoring. Still offshoring is much bigger than near shoring and the gulf is unlikely to narrow down anytime soon. While lower cost is always the driver for offshoring, its early morning / late night working pattern stretches the work day, which in turn delivers the unintended and collateral benefit of accelerated speed to market. Where that's a virtue, the penetration of offshoring is higher. Where that's not a virtue, the penetration of offshoring is lower.

Having worked on both shores, I find it hard to accept that only offshore projects are subject to delays and failures.

IMO, the real danger for offshoring comes from what I call "middle shoring", in which where IT work is moved from the major financial centers to Tier-2 cities and semi-urban areas within the same country. I know of a leading US financial services company that saved 40% costs by moving its card processing IT operations from NYC to Cincinnati, OH. Of course, there are many challenges with this approach. So, middleshoring is only a clear - but not present - danger to offshoring. 

Like you, I've wondered how credit rating agencies escaped litigation for their role in the GFC. Back in 2009, I'd singled them out for incompetence and probable corruptness in a post titled Credit Rating Agencies & The Financial Meltdown on my personal blog (hyperlink removed but this post will appear first when you Google search by the title of the post).

I had a eureka moment from a recent FORTUNE magazine article (can't find the link readily, I'll post it if I eventually find it). From what I remember reading of the article, historically, the US government needed to rate securities for the billions of investments to be made by pension and other state owned funds. Lacking internal bandwidth, it outsourced this activity to the private sector, which resulted in Moody's and other credit rating agencies. Despite their culpability for the GFC, the rating agencies are still sitting pretty since the US government apparently still hasn't developed the capability to take rating back inhouse.

Banks's participation is a nod to the growing traction of P2P lending platforms. Their attempts to securitize P2P loans speaks volumes about their aggressiveness in building out their innovative portfolio of structured financial products. 

This resonates well with my conjecture in Accelerating Mobile Wallet Adoption By Fixing What's Broken.

Since Finextra is a fintech community, would you say that these myths are more or less pronounced in financial services, which is not known for too much ecommerce in the conventional sense of the term?

@GerhardS: 

TY for your comment. 

In Finextra and elsewhere, I've relentlessly advocated a frictionless payment regime. Some others have gone further and proposed that payments should even be invisible. However, in all my work on payments with banks and consumers, the predominant finding that emerges resonates with your opinion: While they don't want to jump a dozen hoops to make a payment, most people do want to know when, why and how much they're paying. Let alone invisible payments, people don't even want frictionless payments. I'm slowly but steadily coming around to the view that the "less friction" message will drive greater mainstream adoption of ePayments than the "frictionless" one. Just as I'd previously learned that "less paper" works far better than "paperless" in promoting eBills and eStatements. 

Talking about deliberate and conscious action while making payments, this is a very interesting topic that has been the source of a perpetual dilemma to me: 

Between website hosting, domain name, VoIP, and a few other services that I use, I need to make around 15 payments to various service providers each month. With each service provider, I've set up a recurring mandate in such a way that they debit my credit card - not bank - account with a fixed amount each month automatically. (In this, I'm excluding mobile phone, utility and other bills where the amount is variable and I've not authorized direct debit). This saves me the time and energy of having to make each  of the 180-odd CNP payments individually every year.

Since I've signed a recurring debit mandate, I've provided overall payment authorization deliberately and consciously. But, to the extent that each payment happens without my explicit consent - some of them when I'm literally asleep - is there a lack of deliberate and conscious action? 

This totally resonates with my personal experience where my contactless card details were sniffed off from 2-3 feet away. 

The Clear And Present Danger With NFC Payments

On the one hand, with contact cards, fraudsters hack into supposedly secure databases, obtain card information, clone cards and steal money. On the other hand, with contactless cards, fraudsters are saved the trouble of the first two steps by being able to sniff card information from a couple of feet away, but UK Card Association would still have us believe that fraudsters can't do anything with that info.

Quite ironic that cash needs to be brought into the picture even for a purely digital currency like BitCoin! On a side note, any idea why this machine is positioned as ATM when it doesn't dispense cash?