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@JamesP is spot on: If the digital-only model really had such a low-cost footprint as it's touted to be, why're UBER, OlaCabs and other "asset-light aggregators" raising 100s of million / billions of dollars of capital? Meanwhile, when was the last time anyone bought a financial product from a remote channel? I thought so, too. IMO, therein lies the Secret Of Survival Of Bank Branches.

With TESCO Bank's spanking new systems causing even longer downtimes, is it already time to estimate the size of market of open systems transforming to legacy?

"The bank has yet to offer an explanation for the cause of the breakdown." When it does, I'm sure what it won't be: Legacy systems.

I agree with @NickC about behavioural, ergonomic and psychological factors at play. That said, maybe banks and other service providers have finally "got" this, since I haven't been under pressure from anyone for at least one year to turn off paper. I've also started noticing TransPromos on paper bill real estates, so maybe these companies have finally stopped obsessing about costs and have shifted their focus to increasing ad revenues. 

I remember the excitement caused by Mint when it launched in 2009 or so. Everyone thought the new genre of Personalized PFMs would revolutionize the way people "work, live and play". The hype was so infectious that I bought the P2FM.com domain name. There was a spate of Mint-clones like WeSabe (USA), Kublax (UK), etc. Unfortunately, when all the hype died down, P2FMs found that not many people were willing to take the risk of violating the TOS of their banks and other service providers by handing over the account credentials of all their accounts to the P2FM. One after the other P2FM shut down, including the aforementioned ones. More in my comments below this post: https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=10059

All the practical problems that affected web-based P2FMs are affecting MObile Money Management Apps (“MoMMAs”). As of now, I haven’t seen MoMMAs do much more than warn their users that their $2.99 coffee will bust their budget. What’s the chance that Gen Y & Z will come out of WhatsApp / SnapChat / Instagram and hand over their account credentials to a MoMMA in return for advice that they must anyway be getting from their biological mothers? Gen Y and Z may be flightly but they’re not fools. 

We know how the web-based P2FM movie ended. The mobile money management app story won’t end very differently. Even if I'm proven wrong in future, we’re talking about the present and paper works best for money management.

This "don't give a damn about individual customer preferences" approach is ludicrously out of synch with current customer engagement best practices around segmentation, targeting, 1-to-1 marketing, etc. Besides, cutting costs is a stupid move when it can result in loss of much greater revenues, as it does in this case: As I'd highlighted in Save Costs But Lose Revenues With eBills And eStatements, "By turning off paper, billers ... save a few pennies ... but ... lose a lot of dollars..."

@CharmaineO & @NickC:

According to his tweet, Bill Gates himself seems to have pushed back the the period of significant change in retail payments to 15 years!

https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/563010428511735810

Today, 2 billion people don’t have a bank account. In 15 years they’ll be making payments with their phones: b-gat.es/1F65ZXa @verge 

From personal experience, I entirely agree with the findings of this study.

It's much easier to annotate a paper credit card statement with a highlighter than an eStatement for things like potentially wrong charges. 

I've blogged and commented to this contrary-to-conventional-wisdom effect on several occasions:

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=6106

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=6281

Am finally glad that empirical studies bear out this viewpoint - again, I notice, contrary to common wisdom: "While many respondents said receiving information in an electronic format helped them manage their finances better, the result of the behavioural experiment found the opposite was true."

From personal experience, I'm reasonably sure that Julia Roberts didn't have to forge Richard Gere's signature: One of my colleagues in my ex-employer's Miami office owed the rest of us in the office a treat. The day we were to go out of lunch at her cost, she couldn't join us. She just handed over her credit card to one of us. After the meal at a neighboring Burger King / KFC / McDonalds - I don't remember which - we just handed over the cardholder-not-present's card at the checkout. The attendant swiped it, printed out the chargeslip and didn't ask for a signature, thereby forsaking any need for forgery.

@PaulL + 1 - and a compelling and high-value one at that. Many hackers have reportedly been offered jobs by the same organization they were caught hacking into. Likewise, I hope these two guys are hired at senior levels in any one of many companies that have only been blabbing nonstop about Big Data and / or mastering the techniques of how to lie with it. 

@KatM:

TY for your reply.

Re. feature set:

Personally, I'm biased towards the omnichannel approach whereas you seem to favor the multichannel approach. I've written about my view of the difference between the two in From Multichannel To Omnichannel And Beyond. At the time, I said multichannel was "neither necessary nor feasible". Now, according to this McKinsey article, multichannel has reportedly been a bad use of IT budgets!

Given the current state of the art in security technology, I tend to believe that it's impossible for a bank to overcome the challenge of "rounding out the app featureset without compromising the ease of use".

Re. granularity:

I tend to agree that repeating the download-install-enroll process for each unbundled mobile app can be frustrating. That said, similar frustrations can happen even on the desktop web. For example, the bank stock trading portal I recently wrote about in Banks Have Nothing To Fear From Neobanks supports trading in Equity, F&O, Funds, Bonds, Foreign Markets, and so on. While all these products are available inside a single portal, each one of them requires separate enrollment including branch visit in some cases. Hardly an example of good UX but I'm willing to give the benefit of doubt to the bank for choosing to go that way despite the obvious compromise in UX - after all, the bank's portal otherwise trumps the UX of all nonbank stock trading portals hollow. Maybe the same logic applies for unbundled mobile apps as well. 

That said, the Swiss Army Knife Android app that I recently came across provides a great example of how to strike the right balance between “too many fine-grained apps with superior UX” on the one hand and “one single coarse-grained monolithic app with inferior UX” on the other. Like how the Swiss Army Knife physical product showed the optimum way of combining multiple tools into one easy-to-use toolkit, I think its app is going to serve as a lighthouse for how to combine multiple apps into one easy-to-use "app bundle".