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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".

@Anon: Under a recent drive launched by the government of India, more than 120M people were able to open regular bank accounts with fairly "lightbrush" KYC. On the other hand, opening a mobile money account via Airtel or Vodafone is quite painful, as I'd highlighted in this post: https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=9273. Therefore, even if you don't share my overall skepticism about "banking the unbanked" (https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=9777), the notion that mobile payments can reach the underbanked is a myth - at least as of the present regulatory framework in India.

This report seems to be assigning a lower rating for a mobile app that has fewer features. This runs counter to the current best practice of developing mobile apps as lightweight apps with fewer, purpose-built features instead of matching their web counterparts feature-to-feature. It'd also be interesting to know if Adaptive Lab rated these mobile apps for features (e.g. Mobile RDC, Account opening by scanning a Drivers License) that leverage camera, GPS and other standard smartphone specs that are absent on a desktop / laptop and hence can’t be supported by NetBanking.

@AbhishekC:

Nothing. I've referred to the Card on Delivery in #3 & #4 of my last comment. However, this option is not widely available. Far as I know, only Flipkart offers it in my city (Pune, India). Even in the case of Flipkart, the courier who came to deliver my two recent consignments didn't carry the POS 2X in a row and insisted on cash. I steadfastly refused and tweeted to the company to ensure that they honored their promise to accept Card on Delivery. Only then did the courier bring the POS and I could pay by card. Only Flipkart can answer why such a thing happens regularly. 

On another note, banking the unbanked is only one part of the whole picture: I know enough merchants who have bank accounts but are still not able to accept card paymentts. To quote a recent example, a store in my neighborhood used to accept cards until recently but is now unable to do so. Apparently, ever since his POS got upgraded, it no longer works on his old telephone. To make it work, he needs a new telephone, the cost of which he finds prohibitive. Hence, he has stopped accepting cards. Regulation (PIN), TELCO (infra) and other factors pose as severe a hurdle towards fostering a cashless economy as unbankedness or tax evasion motives of the merchant community.

@NickC: Good one! The elongated period puts an even greater question mark on the survival of alternative payments providers. I just saw a headline that Amazon has pulled the plug on its mobile wallet product. 

@ShoumitB & @AdityaG:

TY for your comments.

1. You're right about COD not helping in the context of merchant disputes re. defective goods. In fact, I've addressed this point in a slightly different version of this post on my company blog: "As for receiving the wrong or defective item, it already happened with one of my three orders. COD can’t eliminate this clear and present danger with the marketplace model. That said, Amazon India’s simple and fair returns policy substantially mitigates this risk." 
2. I've since then heard from a couple of regular customers of Amazon India that Amazon's couriers actually let customers open the carton and inspect the contents before insisting upon the payment. I've never heard of such a practice with COD anywhere. If it's true, it's one more mitigant against this risk. 
3. I've been a heavy user of credit card ever since I got my first credit card in the late 80s. One main reason: Reward points! Cash on Delivery is definitely a problem in that context - or so I thought until today. I received the delivery notification from Flipkart for one of my recent orders earlier today and was thrilled to learn that the company now accepts Card on Delivery! So, I'm back to cards and reward points!
4. Card on Delivery eliminates the problem with Cash on Delivery for high value purchases.

"One Australian bank  in a trail last year was able to track disgruntled
customers of competitors  and make them offers to switch." This is a low hanging fruit for the use of analytics by banks: I know of a bank in India that has been doing this for a couple of years. By offering 6% interest on savings account as against the 4-5% prevailing market rate, the bank has created a strong value proposition with which to target publicly-disgruntled competitor customers on social media and induce them to switch.

That said, there’s something like "too much analytics" and banks would do well to tread carefully lest their efforts backfire, the way TESCO’s apparently did: https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=9431

A major source of disillusionment must be the outright lies told with Big Data. 

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=10328

Apart from that, there's too much old insight recycled under the garb of Big Data. Two examples that come readily to mind:

1. Using Big Data, insurers are able to price household insurance premium higher for houses next to bars. I've experienced this 15 years ago in Germany without any Big Data.
2. Using Big Data, lenders have found out that people with middle initials are better credit risk. I've heard this 30 years ago in USA, again without any Big Data.

When such recycled insights are quoted to illustrate the power of Big Data, it's not surprising that BFSI executives are very skeptical.