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"...only one-in-five transactions are currently carried out via the branch network." Only? After reading articles and blogs by various digital banking pundits, I thought it was closer to "one in a million"! 

@Brett K:

All banks with whom I have relationships - the number has been close to 10 at the peak of my nomadic days - have fully fledged Internet Banking, Mobile Banking and Phone Banking apart from a branch network. While there's a huge scope for improvement in how they execute on their remote channels (e.g. remove friction in online interactions), I'm quite happy with what they offer there. 

I use different channels for different purposes and these days, whenever I or someone from my family visits a bank branch, we see long queues of customers and a severe shortage of staff. While this is by no means representative of the overall market scenario, it's not something that I can ignore either, especially since my experience is uniform across different cities in India, UK, USA and Germany. I doubt we'd be facing this situation had branch networks still "commanded massive bias in funding in retail banking P&L" as you contend. On the contrary, branch investments seem to be under a stranglehold at retail banks everywhere. No wonder McKinsey recently advised banks in some parts of Europe to actually increase their investments in their branch network.

Unless there's been a recent change, contactless cards have typically used RFID and not NFC technology. I can think of at least two key differences in usage as a result, although I'm sure there are more:

1. In their respective basic configurations, RFID supports only unidirectional communication from the card to the POS terminal whereas NFC supports bidirectional communication between the smartphone and POS terminal, thus opening up many more possibilites with the smartphone (e.g. POS can send a digital receipt to smartphone).
2. Contactless card works even without having to be taken out of a wallet. I've found this to be an especially useful feature when my hands are occupied carrying several shopping bags. With a smartphone, regardless of the attributes of the underlying NFC technology, this is not possible since payor has to open an app (e.g. Google Wallet) on the smartphone and select the appropriate payment method (e.g. credit or debit card) in order to initiate a payment.

Prior technological advance has ensured that, when someone waves either a contactless card or an NFC smartphone in front of a POS terminal, the store attendant gets an audio/visual notification of success of the payment, so s/he does not have to suspect fraud when the payor walks away. 

All along, I was thinking of a generic e-invoicing portal. Now, thanks to Rein G's comments, I suddenly realize that we are staring at not one, but multiple, portals.

To me, the adoption challenge seems to multiply for the following reasons: 

1. As I've commented before, even a single portal lacks a compelling reason for adoption either by suppliers or buyers. Can't imagine that the situation improves for a network of portals. 
2. Is there any guarantee that a single supplier company will only use one (brand of) portal? If not, supplier employees will have to get trained on different portals.
3. Surely each third-party portal provider will promise to deliver *all* invoices from *all* suppliers in the *same* ERP format, so that the buyer/payor would have to invest only *once* in integrating with *all* portals. In an industry that has a multiplicity even of standards, I'm not sure how many average buyers/payors from outside the industry will believe such promises.
4. I don't know why we are talking about forcing all customers to your own model. We are actually talking about forcing all suppliers to the buyer's/payor's model. Service to customers is mandatory. However, giving business and paying suppliers on time might be enough service from buyers/payors to suppliers. 

Forking out money is considered as one of the greatest sources of friction, as evidenced by the universal popularity of *FREE* offers. If I as a supplier can reduce some of that friction by agreeing to follow different invoicing process - be it portal or email or paper - of different buyers/payors, I will gladly do so in order to receive my payment on time.

When defined that way, I admit that generic e-invoicing portal is not a pipedream and I can think of at least three providers of such solutions, namely, PayPal, TradeShift and Intuit (Full Disclosure: Neither I nor my company have any business relationship with these companies). At the same time, their mass adoption is faced with several barriers.

From the perspective of buyers/payors, they become non-generic since the processing at their end would differ for e-invoices received from the multiple e-invoicing providers. If I recall correctly, an Intuit PaymentNetwork executive mentioned a couple of months ago that the challenge is to get buyers/payors to adopt such generic solutions. After all, from their perspective, why won't they like to get all invoices from all suppliers in a single format of their choosing, which appears possible only with a buyer-specific e-invoicing portal? 

Let's look at it from the supplier's perspective. For the supplier's C-Suite, I don't there can be any argument that the primary purpose of raising an invoice is to get paid as quickly as possible. Only the buyer whose name is on the invoice is going to make the payment. If one buyer wants their invoices on paper sent by snail-mail, another wants them as PDFs sent by email and the third one wants them to be published on their e-invoicing portal, it's not such a big deal for the supplier to comply with the diverse stipulations of the three buyers as long as doing so would expedite receipt of their payment. Therefore, even for a supplier, I fail to see a compelling reason to adopt non-buyer-specific generic e-invoicing portals. While they might cut down some wasteful effort in the invoicing department, that's negligible compared to the overall effort incurred by the supplier company in servicing the buyer.

"The AdWords Business credit card ... can only be used for spending on Internet advertising over the search engine." Is this closed loop card of the Google variety?

By generic e-invoicing portals, I understand that they provide identical user experience regardless of biller, bank or portal. When I read "to get there we need ... ", I thought you were highlighting a major challenge in establishing generic e-invoicing portals. Perhaps I misunderstood. If you've already achieved success in this area, maybe you could quote a few success stories.

While buyer portals will be buyer-specific, bank portals will also be bank-specific (try selecting the same utility in the bill pay pages of Internet Banking portals of two different banks, and you'll get my drift). Even third-party e-invoicing portals will inevitably acquire multiple flavors for different billers / banks as they try to boost their adoption.  Unfortunately, like e-billing portals that have been around for over a decade for consumer bills without much standardization, I'm afraid generic e-invoicing is also a pipedream. 

Let's say I'm in the market for a shirt (or a mobile phone or a book). For 'shirt', I appreciate Google Search dedicating enough resources to serve me about 972 million results in 0.21 seconds.  Unfortunately, I don't have the resources to review so many results - a lot of which are spam anyway - to make up my mind. If only I could search for 'shirt' inside Facebook. Even the 2-3 results from my friends would suffice. When I actually tried that using Facebook Search, I got one result from a friend for 'shirt'. However, I got none for 'mobile phone' or 'book', for which Facebook results only showed brand pages related to these items. If only Facebook showed more results from friends in a convenient way, I'd head to Facebook Search first and get results that are virtually endorsements. This illustrates the power of 'Social Search'.

The UK Payments Council may have been well-intentioned while announcing its proposal to drop cheques well ahead of the deadline. However, in hindsight, had it waited for a couple of years for better alternatives to cheques to emerge - none exist today according to a recent Daily Mail article, a view with which I completely agree* - the man on the street would've had the chance to experience them first hand. At that stage, the present hue and cry over "why not cheques?" would've automatically dissipated to "why cheques?".

* for reasons expressed in detail at  

https://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=22761