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In all this praise for Co-Op Bank in Twitter management, are we forgetting that it has done a lousy job in its loan management? A onetime six notch downgrade is not a great way to run a bank. This one fact would keep me away from Co-Op if I were planning to open a new bank account or think a hundred times whether to continue to keep my money there if I were its existing customer.

This is a moment of pride for VocaLink - and for me since I was involved in the FPS program at a Top 5 UK Bank. But, it was also humbling for me to learn from a UK-based business associate yesterday that, while he knew about CHAPS and BACS, he'd no clue about FPS. And, to think that banks aren't even levying any fees for FPS... On second thoughts, if only banks had charged for FPS, the common man might be more familiar with it by now!

The difficulty in "determining the authenticity of accounts" is indeed becoming a major hurdle. Twitter seems to allocate available handles with no ID verification. Not sure whether it's by mutual consent or it's an extreme reflection of Twitter's laissez-faire approach, but @jackdorsey does not belong to Jack Dorsey! 

This is one more incident that shows that large and scaleable identity thefts happen at processors' systems, and not while individual cardholders are shopping online and putting through one-off transactions. I hope regulators, especially in India, recognize this reality and eliminate 2FA requirements that add a lot of friction and cause heavy shopping cart abandonments. Instead, they should shift their focus to verifying how securely processors are storing card information. Accepting processors' stock response, "we're PCI-DSS compliant", to all questions about data security is simply not enough any more.

@Finextra:

By quoting the AP Twitter hack incident in the context of Co-Op, are you by any chance implying that someone hacked into Moody's Twitter account and posted a fake tweet about downgrading Co-Op? For a lot of customers - including me, I'll admit - a downgrade of their banks' debt to junk is adequate trigger for getting butterflies in the stomach, Twitter or no Twitter. IMHO, banks who do a good job of banking management shouldn't have to bother too much about Twitter management.

eBill technology has been around for over a decade and IMHO plays an insignificant role in the bigger picture. I find it difficult to believe that there aren't many other equally sophisticated technologies that make the process easy. The way in which technology is implemented counts for a lot. 40% paper turn off pales in comparison with an insurer that achieved 100% paper turn off by customers with email addresses in one month. How did they do it? Was their technology vastly superior than someone else's? No. They simply stopped sending printed statements to anyone whose email address they had harvested without disclosing the ulterior motive. Likewise, ROI for an eBill solution is misleading in isolation. In this post, I've highlighted how billers can lose $$$ in ad revenues even as they save pennies in cost by implementing an eBill solution. This Gallup poll highlights how billers can lose customers and revenues by forcing customers to accept a channel which is not their preferred one.

According to this recent Gallup poll, 58% of bank customers prefer printed statements via snail-mail and 38% via online (publish to portal). A mere 3% want to receive statements by email, a figure that's even lower than the segment (4%) that prefers to visit a branch to collect printed statements. Having highlighted several issues with eBills and eStatements on more than one occasion - viz. here and here - I'm not too surprised by the overwhelming preference for printed statements. On the face of such numbers, banks need to ask themselves if it's worth adopting eBilling technology even if there are strategies for winning in it. 

Uh oh, in that case, what's to prevent retailers from extending the same "common practice" to this new method of payment? I've always found that retailers want to have their cake and eat it too. Therefore, I don't think a 1p + 1% transaction fee alone will persuade retailers to accept this new MOP or that, when it comes to retailers, anything is that simple. 

As far as I know, card networks don't permit any floor limits for credit card acceptance even while individual merchants openly flout network rules by setting their own limits. I've actually experienced one merchant accepting credit card payment for GBP 3 and another one denying it for GBP 20. A generic GBP 5 floor is news to me.

Kudos to BarclayCard for being the first bank - in my knowledge, at least - to launch this service. And one bit of unsolicited advice for retailers: Resist the temptation to offer special deals only to cardholders who buy from your competitors. I can assure you from personal experience and anecdotal evidence that your existing customers will be very ticked off if you ignore them. Don't forget that, using the same service, your competitors can now offer special deals to them.