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I must have filled some 20 forms in the last one year to onboard various services ranging from college admission (private sector), PAN card (public sector), mobile phone connection (private sector), etc. After doing that, I can say confidently that, barring one or two exceptions, I anyday prefer paper forms in my role as "onboarder". Paper forms work regardless of programmer's IQ. IME, most online onboarding processes are a screwed-up version of the paper onboarding process. Let me cite an example. To onboard one service via paper, I simply had to paste a passsport size photograph in the given slot on the paper form. To onboard the same service via online website, I had to attach an image file with the following specs: "PDF, 300dpi, 3.5 x 5 cms, <50Kb". There's no way anyone short of double PhD in math and graphics design would've been able to create such an image file. I asked the service provider why the heck they can't use software to prepare the image file of the required specs. They had no answer.

Easy to blame the service provider for using sub-standard technology but we also need to question the TCO of a digital solution required to ensure that an online onboarding process delivers better CX than a paper onboarding process. And figure out whether it delivers the required ROI. IME, attempting to drive change by threatening organizations with extinction is a bad strategy. With due respect to John Chambers or whoever, there's no way 40% - or even 4% - of companies in any industry will become extinct as long as most of them use the same sub-standard online onboarding process. By failing to make a dent on traditional banks, neobanks learned this lesson the hard way. Others need to learn it, too.

@AlexanderPeschkoff:

Just stumbled on to an NYT article entitled "In Urban China, Cash Is Rapidly Becoming Obsolete". According to this highlighted passage in the article, much of the movement to cashless in urban China has happened in the last 3 years. This sounds incredible. I don't have any on-the-ground substantiation for this claim by the author but, if it's true, this is revolutionary and totally undermines my conjecture that only the new money in China has gone cashless. For this to have happened in just 3 years, Alipay / WeChat must have replaced a lot of cash and / or plastic.

OTOH, Finextra recently reported that China Union Pay is the world's largest card scheme and that 99% of its card base of 6B cards are used inside China. Given that Alipay / WeChat primarily work over bank accounts - and not credit / debit card - and their ubiquity in urban China, I can't understand where the 6B China Union Pay payment cards are used.

The mystery thickens!

@JohnCandido: Agreed. I also recommend a Tweet button at the merchant premise. One push and all the merchant-related details are geo-sensed automatically and sent immediately to the authorities.

@AnonMember: "Higher prices for cash payers" is an old issue and is called Reverse Robin Hood Effect.

I thought the 10% surcharge I mentioned in How To Fight Credit Card Surcharge And Take CashlessIndia To The Next Level was high. I'm shocked to learn that some merchants charge as high as 20% for accepting credit card payments. Normally, I'm in favor of market forces slugging it out but, in this case, this is indeed a "rip-off" and I hail the UK government's move to ban such surcharges. That said, ground-level enforcement of similar bans has been a challenge in other countries that have mandated them. It'd be interesting to watch how UK government plans to ensure that merchants comply with its ban in actual practice.

I thought 10% was high. According to this article on Finextra, some merchants levy up to 20% surcharge for accepting credit cards payments.

However low the TCO of a core banking lite application, I still tend to believe it would be at least 5X that of a prepaid card platform. But I'm open to changing my mind if I get concrete TCO comparisons.

I don't know how many challenger banks are running on prepaid card platforms but, assuming that there are many of them, the reason for their choice is obvious: The TCO of a Tier 1 prepaid card platform is around 1/5th that of a Tier 1 core banking system. And, for the current range of products that challenger banks offer, a prepaid card platform offers comparable functionality as a CBS. So there's no point in spending for a CBS upfront. Now, I know an "account management platform" is not the same as CBS but, in this day and age, no one wants to go back to the 60s era of having a disparate account managment platform from a CBS.

There are obviously many ways to walk the tightrope between convenience and security but IMO the customer segmentation approach advocated by McKinsey in its article entitled Is cybersecurity incompatible with digital convenience? comes closest to cracking this Holy Grail. Of course it won't work in countries where overzealous regulators ram a one-size-fits-all version of extreme security down the throats of the banking industry.

This can be big. Just the other day, a customer was asking me how long is it before "Alexa how many hits did my website get from Facebook today?" becomes a reality. Best wishes to Veezoo.

On a lighter note, when Veezoo says "Decision makers can simply ask their questions in plain German", does it mean High German or Swiss German?:)

"for the first time more than half of all retail purchases were made using plastic." What a surprise. I thought mobile wallets would've killed plastic by now LOL:)