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If "millennials are ... delaying marriage, shunning mortgages, credit cards and other financial services", why're they an important market for banks?

Maybe banks are making record profits (*1) because they're shedding millennials (*2) and leaving them to neobanks who, funded by VC money, seem to have an endless capacity for absorbing losses.

*1: http://online.wsj.com/articles/u-s-banking-industry-profits-racing-to-near-record-levels-1407773976

*2: https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=9841

Or you could subscribe to a service like BillGuard (where it's available) to get automatic alerts of fraudulent charges.

Banks have been offering realtime corporate payments (Fed, RTGS) for a long time despite legacy systems. 

Legacy IT landscapes haven't stopped banks from developing algo trading systems that work so much in realtime that even the speed of light has proven to be a limiting factor in their operation. Interestingly, an HFT doyen is quoted in Michael Lewis's latest bestseller Flash Boys as saying that he acquired the superior skills required to develop algo trading software because of his experience with legacy mainframes.  

So banks can easily offer realtime retail payments over their present legacy estates (as many of them have already done in UK via FPS). But they'd lose float income in that case. And that could be a HUGE problem, come bonus time!

IMHO, only legislation can compel banks to offer realtime retail payments. Legacy is only a smokescreen, perhaps meant to keep the regulators at bay and to send fintech professionals on a wild-goose chase!

More like Amazon ditching its payments product, as Kickstarter itself has acknowledged in its last FAQ item.

My experience is quite different: Every time I log on to my current 3 banks' NetBanking, I see an offer right on top. Even when I don't log in to NetBanking, I keep receiving offers via SMS, Mobile App, Social Media.

Cardlytics, just one provider of Amazon-like offers for banks, claims a portfolio of 400 FI customers. Agreed that smaller banks might not be using this kind of technology but the same is equally true for smaller ecommerce companies when compared to Amazon.

Most importantly, by the very nature of their products / services, a comparison between banking and ecommerce is fundamentally misplaced: I'm hardly a heavy ecommerce shopper but I must've placed at least 100 orders so far only on Amazon. Whereas, thanks to my somwhat nomadic career, I've banked with around 15 banks in 5 countries and I haven't had the need to buy more than 20 banking products during a like period. After all, how many checking accounts, fixed deposits, CDs, funds and mortgages can one buy in a lifetime compared to the number of books, music, toys, clothes, gadgets, etc.? 

@ChetanG: The way I understand the transaction flow, the moment the bank authorizes a credit / debit card payment, it makes a provision to debit your account, whether or not it credits the merchant's account (in the event of a successful transaction) or not (in the event of a failed transaction). Therefore, the bank can alert you that you've "spent money" - just that it might not necessarily be for your intended purpose with the merchant:). Didn't this happen in your numerous experiences when the transaction didn't go through at merchant?

If they want to, they can do a lot of things viz. file a police complaint, let the FBI loose, arrest, and so on. Going by what I read in Michael Lewis's latest book, Flash Boys, another leading investment bank did all this and more in a somewhat similar situation - just that, in their case, the employee had allegedly stolen code rather than data.

Product, marketing and consumer preference have little to do with whether a bank is a legacy player or a digital neobank:

1. As I'd highlighted in this blog post (https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=8608), "With whatever (legacy) systems they have, banks have proved their innovativeness by launching ARM, CDO, CDO2, CDS, MBS and a slew of highly innovative structured financial products...".
2. The same old legacy banks are amongst the biggest spenders on Digital Marketing, as suggested by the fact that the three most expensive keywords in Google Ads are for banking products (http://www.wordstream.com/articles/most-expensive-keywords). 
3. I wonder how many customers who availed - or did not avail - themselves of accounting switching facility even knew what "legacy player" meant, let alone decide whether to switch banks or not on the basis of that expression.

IMHO, legacy systems is only the deck a bank is dealt with. What an individual bank does with it is entirely up to that bank.

By law, Indian customers have been receiving realtime SMS Alerts for all debit and credit card transactions for several years. Going just by the screenshots displayed in this article, I find my SMS Alerts far more informative - if not easier to read - than these watch alerts. But that's only me: I'll readily agree with anyone who claims that GenY doesn't fancy SMS and that they'd would go gaga over anything happening on a wearable device.

Falling prices lead to reducing purchasing power of BTC, as long as the prices of goods that can be bought with it are denominated primarily in real currencies. This must be a concern for enthusiasts as well.