Regardless of our opinion of the original article, or your response, I do think your response misses a vital but pivotal point. John isn't writing as a payments expert, or even someone in the industry. He writes as a *customer*. As such, its less about facts, more about experience and perception. If that's his experience, then, as an industry, we should be listening, not pointing fingers saying yeah, but we're better than them.

Whilst I like LevelUp, it was slightly amusing to see you use them as a success story, yet dismiss contactless in the UK, even though contactless it has been around approximately the same amount of time and has c.80 times more monthly volume! I guess it all depends on how you define success and innovation, and thats really the key here. Unless we have a common, shared view of where we are and where we want to go (ie what the Fed study aimed to create a discussion around) then no-one is going to agree on the two articles.

"It’s true though that on the corporate side, something like 70 percent of all payments between businesses are still made by check. But that’s for one big reason: the alternatives haven’t, until recently, been all that compelling for buyers or suppliers."

2/3rds of checks globally are written in the US. Next come India and Iran. In the majority of countries globally, the majority of B2B transactions take place by ACH. Or, indeed, so do C2B or B2C. Its hard *not* to pay some bills by ACH. That would suggest that the issue is with the US ACH system, not ACH as a system.

The issue is not (just) the cost of doing some of these things, or upgrading the systems, but the revenue. ACH is a fraction of the cost of a check - but banks make far more money from checks. Innovation is great - but money talks louder.

Finally, the UK card fraud - a misleading quote, and out of context. Yes, its up 7.4% ...but to 0.074%. ie up 0.0055% . It also includes things which are likely to happen whatever the card type (ie Identity theft).