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Kudos to ING Direct USA for launching this online calculator as an innovative way to point out the high cost of overdraft fees levied by other banks. By permitting overdrafts, albeit without any fees, ING Direct is letting customers have their overdraft and eat it too! However, before customers rush to open the Electric Orange account with ING Direct USA on which this calculations are based, they should check out the maximum overdraft amount and term allowed by ING Direct as well as the comparitive costs for those figures. For example, for an overdraft amount of $5000 for 30 days, this calculator reveals that ING Direct's charges at $29.79 are not much lower than the $30 charged by other banks. While the calculator does not accept amounts over $5000 or a period that is higher than 30 days, it doesn't take a PhD in mathemticals to realize that its charges are higher than that of other banks if such higher figures were permitted in the actual account.

After trying to get banks and financial institutions to adopt Web 2.0 technologies for over a year, I can easily appreciate your viewpoint. At the same time, if we look at it from a another perspective, the reluctance of banks has actually led to a new crop of third-party providers offering such functionality. For example, Offermatic is a newly launched website that parses through your credit and debit card transactions and makes offers that are highly personalized to you - a feature that I see in your wishlist. Maybe the banking industry is just following the footsteps of the software industry - there are so many companies doing quite well with Windows and Office add-on products that do little more than plug gaps left by Microsoft.

Hope the cash dispenser manufacturer doesn't get sued by the bank and car owners - after all, they caught the flak only because the cash dispenser proved to be "bomb-proof"!

When Wal-Mart tried to drive RFID technology in the retail industry a few years ago, it resulted in a lot of buzz but nowhere near 100% adoption even several years after its original deadline has passed. It remains to be seen how much impact its current call for EMV is going to make in the USA. But, one thing is for sure: a moniker like "bandaid" solutions from someone like Wal-Mart threatens the prospects of nuBridges and other providers of E2EE and Tokenization solutions.

Perhaps Maxis and / or PayPal can highlight which specific aspect of their partnership helps in enhancing the consumer experience. After all, even without such a partnership, it is possible to visit any merchant's website on a mobile phone and pay by PayPal without having to enter payment details, regardless of who is the mobile network operator. It can be argued that, using a mobile phone, there's a lot of friction in navigating a merchant's website that is not optimized for mobile browsing. While that's right, fact is, only the merchant can do something about making the experience frictionless. I am not sure what role PayPal or the MNO can play in that.

100% false positive is quite interesting to note because most studies citing shortcomings of fingerprint authentication point to true negatives where the genuine customers are rejected by the reader if their fingers are sweaty, have a cut, or for other trivial reasons. Accepting that it's easy to fool the reader using gelatine, won't it be difficult for an impostor to obtain the "true fingerprint" off of a genuine customer?

In my exposure to mobile banking in the UK (Barclays) and India (ICICI, HDFC) over the past couple of years, I have rarely found any functionality that leverages its key differentiators of being mobile and handheld.  For example, I don't see much point in finding out my account balance or Last 3 transactions via my mobile phone, when I  can very well do it thru' Internet Banking lot more conveniently. On the other hand, if I could pay my bills wherever I am by simply typing a PAY command on my mobile handset in response to an incoming SMS alert, that would save me a lot of time as compared to doing this via Internet Banking and encourage me to use mobile banking more.  While customers like a responsive bank, when it comes to mobile banking, I think banks can take some time out to figure out strong use cases for mobile banking, instead of pushing it out the door as just another channel.  

Whether it's ACH or Expedited Payments in the US, FPS or BACS in the UK, or NEFT in India, most bank provided electronic person-to-person solutions that I'm familiar with require the sender to know the receiver's bank account number and sort code (among other information) and enter them accurately. The sender is held totally responsible in case they end up entering incorrect information for whatever reasons. I have yet to come across a single bank that verifies the information in real-time and assures the sender that the entered combination of account name and sort code indeed belongs to the intended receiver.

This is bound to cause a lot of anxiety to many people, thereby reducing the number of people who go ahead with using these eP2P products, especially when they face no such complications when they write a cheque. I am sure this stunts mass adoption of eP2P products, something that might be borne out if banks monitor "abandonment rates" on their eP2P transaction screens.

Against this backdrop, FiServ's product sounds promising. By asking the sender to only enter the recipient's email address or mobile phone number, it removes a major area of friction that afflicts all present eP2P solutions. As a result, it should gain rapid popularity among customers of banks. However, since it has the potential to cannibalize usage of alternative fee-generating products already offered by banks, it remains to be seen how extensively FiServ manages to gain their acceptance.

When sellers get together to set prices and other terms, that's called cartelization, which is illegal in many parts of the world. If that be the case, should buyers be permitted to get together for a similar purpose?

As the story of PayByTouch illustrates, biometric payment at the point of sale might be a solution chasing a problem. This well-known  American startup burned through close to US$ 200M in providing a fingerprint-based payment system for supermarket checkout before it went bankrupt.

On the one hand, vendors claim that their solutions can differentiate between a live organ and a dead one, but on the other, we have a Dan Brown bestseller in which villains kill someone only to harvest their eyes to break through a highly-secure system based on iris scanning.

To make sure that a nick in one finger doesn't result in a false-rejection, vendors have started fingerprinting more than one finger - in fact, one state in India has implemented a solution that uses prints from all ten fingers!

I don't think biometric payments come anywhere close to the convenience of cash or credit card - at least not in their present form. And going by the processing fees of PayByTouch, they don't seem to be much cheaper either.