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@AmitV: Kudos for a highly novel style of blogging that uses so much dialog. Hope this sets a new trend. Look forward to many more posts written in this style. 

Social listening has been de riguer in B2C but a bank CEO tweeting about his tech vendor is a good illustration of why this technology is relevant in B2B as well. Hopefully, HP won't reply with the standard boilerplate used by many B2C service providers (including maybe Lloyds TSB:)), "Please DM us your contact info and one of our executives will get in touch with you"!

I clicked thru' and learned that the "this" in @PaulPester's tweet to @dangerfield_gem refers to the charge made by some website that this IT meltdown was caused by offshoring. By asserting that there's "no truth in this", TSB's CEO has issued a highly vocal and public endorsement of offshoring.

The second largest private sector bank in India, HDFC Bank, has offered a "Your Favorite Transaction" on its ATM for years. From personal experience, it slashes cash withdrawal time by at least half. I find it to be a simple, yet valuable, piece of innovation. Only problem is every time the ATM switch software is updated, the ATM forgets your favorite transaction and you need to set it up again! I tweeted my pet peeve to the bank and immediately got a scripted reply: "@s_ketharaman Thank you for bringing this to our notice. Will take it up with the concerned team. - Tejal". This was around 2 weeks ago and I'm still waiting for an update that this problem has been resolved.

My experience resonates with Indian banks playing a leading role in using social media to scout for new prospects: I recently sent out a tweet complaining about the unilateral manner in which both my current banks decided to discontinue print statements. Within a couple of hours, I heard about two other banks continuing to offer print statements, one of them on executive bond paper! The great thing about the social channel is you hear back from third parties having no vested interest, which lends a lot of trust and credibility to their opinion.

Coincidentally, I just sent this tweet out a couple of minutes ago: "This was one of my busiest weeks of QR code spotting since I started this exercise 3 years ago. Newspapers and B2B were the major use cases" (https://twitter.com/GTM360/statuses/426777259761225728). I think Swedbank's decision to deadpool its BART mobile payment app has more to do with the lukewarm reception accorded to all forms of mobile wallets by the general public and less to do with its being based on QR codes. 

Much is made of the friction involved in downloading and installing a QR reader. I don't deny that there's some friction. However, if only Finextra-consuming digerati can be expected to overcome such friction, how come hundreds of millions of people have downloaded and installed mobile apps like FourSquare, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat and WhatsApp?

The marketer in me believes that anyone can be persuaded to download and install a mobile app, provided there's something in it for them. With the aforementioned blockbuster apps, they find that something. With mobile wallets, they don't, and no amount of tweaking or changing the underlying technology is going to change that. 

After having had to give it up in its home country years ago, the parking operator must have wanted to relive its nostalgia for the good old days by forcing cheques abroad. (Back in 1999, when I opened a bank account in Germany, I received 5 cheque leaves. I returned all of them unused when I closed the account in 2003.)

Let me guess: Author's company Ontology is into Semantic Search.

Check out website: Ontology applies the power, simplicity and speed of semantic search to gain insight ... 

Verdict: Guess seems right. 

How is this any different from NetSpend, GreenDot, ...? In fact, by waiving fees for almost all activities, T-Mobile might shake up the prepaid card market dominated by NetSpend and GreenDot, which itself set out to shake up the check cashing market. 

I remember reading about "realtime payment for use car purchase" as one of the potential use cases of FPS in a VocaLink-PwC white paper released in 2009, a year after FPS went live. Happy to see this finally turn into reality!

Articles on this subject are generally pontificating in nature. Kudos for going off the beaten track and providing pragmatic examples of personalization. Many of my banks regularly send alerts via telephone, credit card statements and NetBanking for personal overdraft and fixed deposit, which I find on your list.

Taking personalization beyond a certain level is fraught with several challenges:

• When a customer receives a mortgage offer from a bank (because they have visited the mortgage product webpage often), and then gets rejected (because their income level makes them ineligible for the product), the bank ends up with an irate customer because it's human nature to assume that when one receives an offer, one is deemed eligible for it. 
• Many personalized offers can't be fulfilled profitably. I remember this comment when someone proposed front row seat to a baseball game as an example of "offer-for-one".
• 'Mass customization' could be viewed as 'massive discrimination', thus inviting regulatory ire, as Ron Shevlin points out here. 

That said, this is still not preaching to the converted since there could be many banks who haven't even started on the A-B-C of personalization.