![]() ![]() A recent poll in the UK found that half the people surveyed said they only carried a wallet to store non-payment cards such as driving licences and loyalty cards (and that's without taking into account the fact that payment cards themselves are an identity product and not money in any sense of the word). It turns out that I am hardly alone in this respect. There is no cash in my wallet and there has not been for some time. This is not a difficult position to justify. The report suggests that for digital identity systems to succeed, banks must bridge the divide between the private and public sectors and drive adoption of so-called digital identity wallets. In particular, Expert Group identify unique opportunities for banks to leverage their position as custodians of personal data to offer value-added digital identity services and become brokers of trust in the digital economy. Pictures of the Zelle logo are taped to cash registers in supermarkets, some of which have dedicated lines for customers paying with the app!) (Incidentally there is at least one place where Zelle is accepted by retailers and that is Caracas, where the homemade signs in shop windows reading "Aceptamos Zelle" are common. Indeed they do, and as I have previously pointed out in my comments about Europe’s “third scheme”, there are lots of reasons why account-to-account makes sense to consumers and merchants alike. I think that is a crucial, and initially overlooked, aspect of the announcement because as the widely-respected payments industry observer Tom Noyes reported in his blog, the big US merchants are lukewarm on implementing yet another means of accepting cards whereas one of the top merchants told him "I wanted to accept Zelle, consumers know what that is”. ![]() That point is important, because EWS has said that it will explore adding other payment options in the future, including enabling payments directly from bank accounts (my emphasis). In particular, it is optimised for the payment card experience and is not “ well-suited to non-card payment methods”. SRC is a well-designed and thought-through system, but as Adrian Hope-Bailie observed, it is not perfect. Consumers will see the SRC standard as “Click to Pay”, just as they see the EMV standard as “Chip and PIN”.) (If you’ve not heard of SRC, don’t worry about it. ![]()
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