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True. In addition Pay By Touch faced a cultural challenge somewhat unique to USA. Many countries in ROW have attempted / succeeded in creating Fingerprint-based Citizen ID systems e.g. India, UK. There were no such systems in the USA when Pay By Touch was around. Fingerprinting was - perhaps still is - associated with criminals who were "printed" after getting arrested. This thwarted scaling up user count to the levels required for Pay By Touch to become sustainable.

Believe It Or Not: Use of cash at POS in USA has actually gone up from 2014 to 2015! http://ow.ly/UvZCX

I know timing plays an important role but micropayments was tried by many websites 6-7 years ago and abandoned soon thereafter. Turned out - at least then - that there was a huge gap between people who said they'd pay and those who actually hit the micropay button when they saw it. I'd written about this 6 years ago in my blog post titled Micropayments – Saviors or Enablers? (Hyperlink removed to comply with Finextra's Community Rules but this post will appear at the top of Google SERP if you search by its title).

Hope Fingopay has better luck than Pay By Touch, the US fingerprint-based PSP that's regularly featured in all league tables of startups that got most heavily funded and flamed out.

As I write this comment, I'm staring out of my office window at a construction site where a 20 storey building is coming up. I see one crane and barely 10 laborers. 10 years ago, a similar site would've been swarming with at least 150-200 laborers. That said, I'm sure the crane manufacturer employs more people today than it did 10 years ago. So, while there's a reduction in manpower in the construction industry, there's an increase in manpower in the heavy engineering industry. Likewise, due to the factors mentioned in the article and comments, there's bound to be a reduction of manpower in the financial services industry but also an increase of manpower in the tech industry that increasingly powers it.

But this logic applies only in the developed world. In emerging markets - like India - new customers are being added to the banking system every day. While an old bank customer - like me - rarely visits a branch, new bank customers seem to first want to use branches before ever going digital, so the number of branches is increasing at a rapid clip and, along with that, so is manpower in the banking industry.

Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, Google Product Manager - and many gurus have said that a company cannot scale if it keeps building all (or even most) features requested by all (or many) customers. Thence the famous Steve Jobs quote, “it's not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying no to all but the most crucial features.” This advice seems to contradict the advice to listen to customers and build features requested by them. Ergo I believe that successfully walking the tightrope between contradictory approaches is a greater driver of scaling up rather than just following one approach over the other. 

In the USA, less than 10% of retail sales happen online (web + mobile). Less than 5% of that is paid with mobile payments (including wallets like Google Wallet and non wallets like Apple Pay). So mobile payments accounts for 0.5% of retail sales. Figures for India are hard to come by but, even assuming they're comparable to those in USA, mobile payments is too small to even qualify as peanuts. And it's too premature to worry about mobile payments coming in the way of human relationships. On a side note, I've tried mobile wallets from TELCOs (e.g. Vodafone MPESA) and from FINTECH (e.g. PAYTM). None of them delivered the convenience I was seeking. But that changed with HDFC Bank PayZapp. 

HDFC Bank's PayZapp Ends My Bill Payment Woes

There's also the tradeoff between convenience and the type of human relationships that one encounters while paying a bill to be considered!

When you say "So if I am offered an add-on for free, that’s fine", is there an implication that, unlike in the case of a paid add-on, there's NO need to "inform the customer" anything at all about the add-on? To me, doing good by customer, especially in a tricky product category like insurance, should entail an explicit mention of not just the cost but features, benefits, obligations, claim procedure, and other details.

Nice post. "Crossing the chasm" is indeed a critical success factor. That said The ability to "cross the chasm" from the early adopter to the mainstream stage of market is indeed a critical success factor. That said, the path from early adopter to mainstream stages of the market is not so straightforward: While it's necessary to listen to customers, the gurus also say that the vendor must develop a p.o.v and have the ability to rally the market around it and that it must say NO more often than YES, and so forth. IMO, key is the ability to strike the right tradeoff between seemingly contradictory approaches. And, of course, timing and a lot of luck!

Scary (for the workforce) but quite credible, considering algo trading already accounts for 60% of stock trading in the USA (according to Michael Lewis's latest book Flash Boys).