The personal touch

FOR all the growth of e-commerce, it has lagged behind in one significant respect: payments. Almost all goods and services bought on the Internet are paid for by old-fashioned credit- or charge-cards. Yet for many sorts of transactions, plastic is inappropriate or unusable. Most attempts to launch rival online payment-systems have been false starts. But over the past few months, three big American banks have been having another try. They are promoting new services aimed at filling one of the most glaring gaps left by credit cards: settling person-to-person (P2P) transactions.