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This just came in: "The iTunes Hack Attack, Hiding in Plain Sight". Even if Apple started offering payments - which I strongly doubt for reasons mentioned in my earlier comments - I'm not sure if I'd want to use it. As we fintech professionals are debating about the merits and demerits of retailers entering payments, it's ironic that this article written by a retail industry analyst advises retailers to leave payments to banks and credit card processors!

It's evident that banks own the payments rail today and have done so for decades. While anything can happen in future, the fact that most payments providers still use banking rails for payments makes the guideposts very clear for any crystal ball gazing. Investment, trust, regulation, "why bother" by Apple and other nonbank giants - these are the impediments to any alternative rails. And, yes, I almost forgot to add "non core" to this list, which emerged from a recent deadpool event that took place between our comments: Nokia Money. 

Even when consumers become more comfortable with mobile payments, most forms of such payments available today will only replace the physical plastic form factor with the mobile phone form factor - the underlying credit card account and the payer's relationship with the issuer bank will still remain intact. When they were launched a couple of years ago, Boku, Zong and other GenY Mobile Payments threatened to remove credit card accounts and disintermediate the issuing banks by executing the entire payment transaction on telecom carrier rails instead of card network / ACH rails used by most other mobile payments providers. However, with many GYMPS now allowing payers to link their - ahem - credit cards to their mobile phones, that threat has passed.

When faced with declining interchange revenues post Frank-Dodd-Durbin, AmEx and a couple of other banks - albeit in the USA - did bite the bullet by trying to charge for debit cards. That they faced tremendous consumer resistance and were forced to roll back their plans is true but the incident does prove that banks don't shy away from levying explicit / implicit fees to recoup rising costs. But, they're still not doing it for checks. Wonder why. Something tells me that by merely levying fees for check usage, banks won't be able to reduce its consumption significantly. Personally, I believe that most ePayments still have too much friction for the average man on the street to forego the convenience of checks even if the latter attract fees. My belief is reinforced by the decision of ING Direct to actually introduce checks for Internet-only accounts.  

Barclays' PingIt is surely a step in the right direction and I look forward to seeing some figures on how many people it has prevented from writing checks.

Alas, but I think she was right! The new shopping behavior spurred by RedLaser and its clones underscores the threat to physical stores. Going forward, we'll only only see more - not fewer - "BORDERS moments". But, with less than 10% of all shopping currently happening online, I don't think physical stores will vanish anytime soon, even if they've already entered a terminal decline. 

I don't know how common the practice is but I've heard that some stores have started blocking WiFi / 3G access or otherwise blocking customers from scanning barcodes on products in their shelves. Instead of resorting to such myopic behavior, I hope they concentrate on making sure that the "Shop Online, Pickup at Store" option turns out to be the best deal.

I notice how this and a few other recent Finextra articles on eBills begin with with "paperless" and jump quickly to discussing the advantages of one form of eBill ("eBill via Email") over another ("eBill via Portal"). Makes me wonder if these two eBill camps have given up on fighting paper bills altogether and have instead decided to spar against each other. On second thoughts, that's not such a bad move. After all, paper bills don't seem to be going away even a decade after they were introduced. According to a Forrester report I remember reading sometime back, ebill adopters - via email and portals alike - are outnumbered by over 1:2 by non-adopters comprising Holdouts, Fence-Sitters and Quitters. Double-dippers only exacerbate the situation.

At the most basic level, bills are a necessary evil regardless of the form in which they reach me. On the other hand, music is a delight whether I listen to it on vinyl or MP3 or any other form in between. Therefore, I must be pardoned if I simply don't get the connection between bills and music / iTunes.   

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.