The new World Retail Banking Report 2006 can be downloaded now from CapGemini's site. Whereas previous versions just listed average prices for payment packages in all countries, the consultants have now anonymized their information.
So we used to be able to see that the Netherlands was cheapest in offering payment services with an average price of about € 31. But now, the consultants have made a bunch of categories to prevent such lists from being the summary of the report. Apparently their customers in Italy (which were highest on the list of average payment cost) didn't appreciate these explicit rankings.
Still the Financieele Dagblad figured out that effectively the new Dutch figure for average payment package costs is € 33. And instead of cheering at the fact that this was still the lowest in Europe and, the newspaper brought the news as a considerable increase (4,5% in their calculation) of payment costs.
It's also interesting to note that the second part of the report did not get much attention. It demonstrates the shift from bank branch banking towards multi-channel distribution of financial services. So there also are nice figures of bank branches becoming less important as a delivery channel. See also the posting on Crone.
