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One way to measure the severity of payment fraud is by absolute numbers. In an ideal world, there should be no fraud at all. Taken to an extreme, I won't tolerate even a penny of fraudulent transactions on my account. However, detecting and preventing fraud gives rise to false-positives, which in turn reduce revenues and spoil customer experience. Therefore, for issuers and merchants alike, Fraud / Spend ratio is likely the most practical metric to gauge the state of payment fraud. On that count, "...fraud levels are close to a historic low, equating to just 0.04 per cent of all spending", according to this latest report from Visa Europe.

How ironic that the NFC story starts with "you don't have to carry around a bulky leather wallet with so many plastic cards" and ends with users not finding space to even accommodate a single NFC tag for one credit card! Sounds like NFC is already broken. On another note, given that Samsung S3 has inbuilt NFC, why does BarclayCard even need to issue a separate tag?

Don't know about BarclayCard but from my experience with a couple of similar campaigns from other banks, the LIKE is itself a red herring. Once visitors are drawn to the bank's social media page by the contest, they're enticed to respond to a CTA via a promotional offer e.g. apply for a credit card. By their very nature, these are one-off CTAs. The prize money is so small that such these campaigns deliver very low CPLs. Although it's debatable whether social media should be used in this fashion for lead generation - as against branding and long term community building - such campaigns are not uncommon.

Doesn't NAB's domain name registrar provide a "Automatic Domain Renewal" feature? 

Great post! As they say, death and taxes...

By the same token, retailers know about processing fees when they sign up with card schemes, card schemes aren't charities and retailers should ditch card schemes if they find them too expensive. IMHO, the problem is, retailers want to have their cake and eat it too.

Banks are already innovative. MBS, CDO, CDS, CDO2 - these are all examples of highly innovative products from the banking industry. It's another thing whether their innovation has helped enhance shareholder value, boost executive bonuses or make customers' lives easier. IMHO, replacing legacy software by open systems or putting a sticker on the back of my smartphone as a substitute for a plastic card shouldn't be confused for innovativeness. 

I believe retailers are charging me too much for milk, bread and many other essential commodities I buy from them. I have a sneaking suspicion that my building owner is overcharging me on my office rent. While I'm at it, let me not forget the MNOs who shouldn't be charging me so much for 3G. Can I now file a lawsuit against all of them now? Right, I thought so, too. Why, then, should courts entertain lawsuits from retailers against card schemes? What's stopping retailers from ditching scheme-issued cards and introducing alternative payments? 

There's perhaps a big enough market of merchants that can't or won't accept credit cards who form the target audience for Zapp, so it should be possible for banks to join Zapp without the risk of cannibalizing their credit card interchange revenues.

Just today, when I logged on to the NetBanking of a bank where I've had an account since 2004, I was addressed as "Dear Employee" and offered a loan targeted exclusively at its employees. After 9 years of having me as its customer, this bank hasn't learned - or ignores - that I've never worked for it. I'm slowly reconciling myself to banks and targeted offers being mutually exclusive, at least for the forseeable future.

Kudos to CBA for showing care and concern for this critical segment of staff that inevitably gets many more brickbats than bouquets.