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@Finextra: Are detailed company-specific pitches now allowed on your blog posts / comments?

While I agree on most points, cloud is only cheap to start but not to keep running. In more than one study conducted by my company, we've found out that TCO of many SaaS solutions exceeds that of onpremise software beyond 36 months, so that's "1 reason why running a business has never been so costly". Based on the figures given in this article, the cutover period could drop precipitiously to less than 18 months in the case of SaaS 250-pound chimpanzees like SFDC who, in addition, want a year's payment upfront and push for three-year contracts. 

The investing banking industry has perfected the art of "whenever in doubt, securitize it, sell it and collect bonus". The recent moves to sell credit card and other transaction data suggests that the retail banking industry is fast catching up.

With US$ 200B in profits, financial services is the most profitable industry in the latest FORTUNE 500 list. In reality, money spent on RTB v. CTB or open v. closed standards and competition from new banks and nonbanking FSPs - none of this has really mattered to the survival or profitability of traditional banks, at least the ones in USA. I can imagine how banking executives might be thinking that the old adage about learning new tricks should be redirected back to vendors that are still trying to hawk their wares by painting the same old doomsday scenarios while the banks are laughing all the way to the - er - bank.

In this day and age of instant gratification thru' geofenced offers and realtime redemption at the POS, this process leads to a few interesting questions: What's the need to "accept"? Why should the shopping happen "later"? Why can't it hapen online immediately after I click the "accept" button? If it can only happen later in a brick-and-mortar store, how does one remember what offer one has accepted earlier?

@RaymondL can rest assured that I've used a contactless card exactly as described - and I've linked to more details of the circumstances thereof in one of my previous comments - and I can show a demo of that even now. But, I didn't have any more contactless cards in my wallet at the same, so I agree that this mode of use is not scaleable. If there are multiple contactless cards in the wallet, I recognize that this mode of usage will either fail or work too well for my good by causing double-dipping. I've said before that half the convenience of a contactless card is lost if you must take it out of your wallet, so I agree with @AlexanderP's comment. It's not such a big difference whether you hand over the contactless card to the attendant or tap it yourselves - double-dipping is a clear and present danger if the wallet containing other contactless cards is in the vicinity of the contactless reader. My use case of laptop plus shopping bag is hardly rare. If issuers ignore such a common use case, it's no surprise that they're facing such an uphill task pumping up contactless card adoption some 5+ years after launching it.

When you're carrying your laptop bag in one hand and a heavy shopping bag in another, there's major convenience in making a payment by sidling past the contactless reader without having to take your wallet out of your pocket, let alone a particular card from out of the wallet. But, let's ignore that scenario for a moment. Even assuming that I take out my desired contactless card and hand it over to the attendant, there's every possibility that my wallet containing another contactless card is within the threshold distance of the contactless reader, thereby triggering double-dipping. A comparison with Chip and PIN is not really valid. That was part of EMV regime, which was a regulatory change that gave little choice to the payer or the shopkeeper, whether they understood the new form factor or not. There's no similar compelling reason for adoption of contactless. 

@HansT: Had I seen mention of BIAN in your original blog post, I'd have guessed that you were perhaps referring to open IT standards within a bank rather than across multiple banks. I remember a time about 8-10 years ago when hub-and-spoke was de rigueur for system integration in many industries but point-to-point reigned supreme in banking. Not much has changed since then but, with BIAN, maybe it will. 

Dwolla is already available in the US. It charges zero fee for transactions below US$10. However, I've never understood why consumers would adopt them - no deferred payment or rewards!

NetBanking websites can of course authenticate themselves to users by displaying a graphic or text or both that was preselected by the user earlier. But I think you're asking about incoming calls, for which I have no answer. I keep getting similar calls and I respond similarly. The social engineers quickly hang up when my questions become too uncomfortable. The genuine callers flag me as a "difficult customer in their CRM, which generally helps me get good service when I call them next! Only once did the caller display presence of mind by reading out my last card transaction. Not sure if that's a foolproof method of authentication.