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One look at Nokia Money in action and you saw friction in so many steps. Besides, the Indian regulator RBI restricted its use to payers and payees who already had a bank account with YES Bank or one of the few other partner banks. Against that backdrop, Nokia Money's goal of bringing financial services to the unbanked was a non-starter from the word go.

On another note, I'm not sure how many multibillion dollar behemoths will find revenues from 1.2M fee-paying customers to be more than a rounding error on their P&L. Such a figure is surely dream-come-true for startups and maybe that's who we'll eventually see in mobile payments eventually, with the successful survivors getting acquired by banks - like it happened in prepaid cards (eCount - Citi) and alternative payments (Revolution Money - AmEx). 

"...so that not only is fraud reduced, but customer satisfaction is maintained at the same time." To which, let me add "revenue". While absolute fraud loss figures are useful, the more important metric is "fraud loss as a percentage of transaction value". After all, like DSO, the easiest way to achieve zero fraud loss is by selling nothing! 

Let me venture out with a few of my own answers to some of your questions:  

1. "a compelling value proposition to tap my phone vs. swiping a card": Maybe there's none? With the new generation of offers being applied directly to the credit card account, even mobile coupon delivered on mobile wallets has lost its appeal. 
2. "a simple UI that would make it easy to pay my babysitter": What's wrong with paying with cash? Even assuming the payor wants to go cashless, there's no guarantee that the payee can accept alternative forms of payments. 
3. "It was disappointing that no exhibitor shared quantitative data on how much quicker ... their solution was, as compared to payment methods in place today.": Maybe their numbers prove what many people have experienced in practice, namely, that nothing is faster than cash or credit card?   

Your friend's comments remind of a recent WIRED article titled "We Don’t Have a Mobile Payment Problem; We Have a Mobile Shopping Problem".

While a fall in absolute value of fraud losses is good news, it would be equally interesting to know the trend in fraud loss as a percentage of total transaction value. 

Apple iTunes is a merchant. The millions of cards it has on its file are issued by banks, not Apple. It certainly needs banks to function. Its great UX might sometimes tempt one to buy everything from it instead of facing the friction posed by many other sites - etailers and banks alike - but, unfortunately, one can only buy from iTunes what Apple wants to sell on iTunes.

Even if it braved regulations to enter banking - unlike Google which cited regulation to give up on similar plans - I doubt if Apple would bother doing so: As a tech company, it enjoys better valuation compared to banks, so becoming a bank wouldn't be in the best interest of Apple's shareholders.

Talking about SQUARE, it disrupts POS as you've rightly pointed out. But, in that capacity, it should worry NCR, Verifone and other POS manufacturers. Whether a transaction happens on an NCR POS or SQUARE POS, the bank that has issued the credit card used in the transaction earns the same interchange fees. In fact, before SQUARE, banks had declined merchant accounts to many sellers on account of their low transaction volumes or high risk profiles or both. Now, with SQUARE coming along and taking on the entire merchant risk, these merchants can now accept credit cards which they couldn't before, and banks can earn more interchange fees from their card transactions without bearing any additional acquisition risk. Seen this way, banks should cheer SQUARE along and not be worried about it!

Whether the payer uses Apple iTunes, PayPal, SQUARE or any one of a plethora of mobile wallet offerings, most payments today continue to happen on card network / ACH / RTGS - i.e. "banking rails". Therefore, banks continue to firmly occupy their corner of the four-corner payment model and the newcomers don't threaten their relevance as banks. A couple of years ago, Boku, Zong and other GenY Mobile Payments (GYMPS) seemed to threaten the position of banks by entirely bypassing the banking rails and instead using MNO rails for payments. With many GYMPS recently announcing support for the addition of bank-issued credit cards and checking accounts as additional source of funds, I think that threat has also largely receded.

@Darren N:

Thank you for your reply.

I agree that SOA provides the technology to let banks remain impervious to their internal silos. However, I don't see technology as the determining factor here. From a business standpoint, given the current org structures and bonus policies, why should banks want to ignore silos?

During the period between the preceding comments, I went thru' an experience that I must share since it highlights yet another barrier in the way of silos coming down: I have a checking account and a fixed deposit at a certain bank. I wanted to open a pension fund account in the same bank branch. According to regulation, I had to go thru' a fresh KYC process. What's worse, monthly checking account statements from the same bank didn't qualify to prove my name and address since, as per regulation, KYC can only happen with third-party documentation i.e. documentation issued by another bank / utility / MNO. I'm sure the regulators have a good reason to formulate such policies. However, it can't be denied that they hamper banks from breaking out of silos even if they (i.e. banks) wanted to.

IMHO, there's a long way to go before banks face clear and present danger from nonbank financial services providers. Many of us will load our PayPal Wallet with a few dollars to buy a coffee or a sandwich. The bolder lot amongst us won't mind using our spare cash to make a few unsecured loans on PROSPER or ZOPA. But, how many of us will move our entire life savings from a bank to a mobile wallet (even assuming it was possible to do so) or lend it out on a nonbank lending website? I could go on with more examples but I hope this shows that the threat posed by nonbanking FIs to traditional banks is highly overrated.

I look forward to the day when silos come down and I can enjoy a superior customer experience while dealing with banks. However, I recognize that there are far deeper issues at play here.

Great list, thanks!

From personal experience, we can vouch for the following tools mentioned in your list: Optimizely, WordPress, SlideShare, Skype, Google Analytics.

We also use 1daylater and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it for inclusion as an additional product in the timesheet / timetracking category.

Not able to find the 'document' and 'spreadsheet' categories in your list. While Google Docs might work fine, we use Word and Excel respectively.

@DirkK:

I recently shifted a lot of my blog reading from a laptop to a smartphone. In the context of a blog that's mobile-optimized, let me make a few observations and conclusions that you might find useful: 

1. For some reason, what used to take me 45 minutes per day to read on a laptop only takes 15 minutes on a smartphone.
2. Having shifted to a smartphone, there's no way I'll ever go back to the PC to read this blog.
3. In the past two weeks, I haven't seen / clicked a single ad on this blog. Whereas, on a PC, I used to click at least 4-5 ads every day. I do miss some of these ads but this change in behavior could make a lot more difference for blogs dependent upon Google AdSense and other ads.
4. Needless to say, commenting is lot easier on a PC than smartphone.    

At the risk of jumping to conclusions, it would appear that mobile-optimized versions of blogs are great for the reader but web versions are more enriching (pun intended) for the publisher and the community. 

PS: BTW, I'm one of the 137 users of Finextra's Android App. I just installed it a couple of days ago.  

ICICI Bank has pushed the envelope on technology adoption, as I'd written in this and this Finextra blog post. But half its Facebook App revolves around cheque books and such 'old-age' products and the other half certainly doesn't permit P2P payments via FB. AmEx Serve's claim to uniqueness with such an offering faces no challenge from ICICI Bank! As for PayPal, I'd be happy to learn more from people who've actually tried it.

While I've always maintained that there's a huge need for banks to reduce the friction involved in their current crop of ePayment products, I've never felt that they could be disintermediated in this space by the likes of Google, Facebook or PayPal. Looks like the first purported challenger has withdrawn and the second one is urging caution. The regulatory ax has already come down on the third in India and I hope it's just a matter of time before it will be cut down to size in its primary markets like USA. I'd recently commented on Finextra that there's a difference between payments and shipping a parcel or booking a plane ticket. This announcement ought to make people realize that, while Internet Search is hard, payments isn't easy either.