WASHINGTON — Jovial bonhomie reigned as the three peer-to-peerpayments panelists reunited in the minutes before their sessionstarted at the BAI Retail Delivery conference at the WashingtonConvention Center.

The three – Arkady Fridman from PayPal, Sanjeev Dheer, theleader at Fiserv's CashEdge, and John Feldman, general manager ofclearXchange, the p2p vehicle of JPMorgan Chase, Bank ofAmerica, and Wells Fargo – also had been on the BAI panel in Las Vegas in March.

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And then when the moderator opened the session on Wednesday, thegloves were off and the battle lines drawn. Do consumers want a“bank-centric” P2P solution? Dheer and Feldman unsurprisingly thought so. Fridmanunsurprisingly thought not – “they want a customer-centricsolution,” he said.

Dheer, meantime, proclaimed he had “had an epiphany. We don'tlike the term 'P2P.' We analyzed a year's worth of transactions” –Dheer said CashEdge has a foothold in some 1700 financialinstitutions – “and what we found was a wholly new category oftransactions. They are more personal. More social. We have chosento begin calling them social payments. They are gifts, to pay rent,sharing expenses, so many categories. I was taken aback by thebreadth of what people are using this for.”

Dheer added, “They see this as a core banking function.”

Fridman countered that in fact PayPal has – “for three andone-half years” – worked very hard to partner with banks on P2P.“What does a bank centric solution mean? We are channel agnostic.We see ourselves as a strategic partner to financial institutions.What we are talking about is digitizing the P2P payments thatalready occur via cash and checks.”

Feldman, meantime, played a largely silent role, a role he hadearlier played in Las Vegas. He did note that “the banks have astrong view that this has to be bank centric.”

He did not elaborate on the readiness of the three bigclearXchange banks to invite other institutions to play in theirsandbox. But he did note that, together, the three mega banks “own50% plus of online and mobile banking.”

The one idea all three agreed on: P2P can be a revenue generatorfor financial institutions. Sometimes. In some cases. Expeditedpayments seemed to strike all three as something that could becharged for. Whereas the idea of charging for a $25 birthday giftto be delivered next week to a grandchild seemed ever morefanciful, even to these three panelists.

The one clear takeaway: many financial institutions seemgenuinely to dislike PayPal. But it is not going away.