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3K tweets v. 300K calls per week? Drunk on the Kool-Aid of social media customer service as I am, this is a wake up call that new media communication channels still have a long, long way to go. 

Gain Social Media And Lose The Call Center Hold Music

But, I'm sure things will change when customers realize that you can get a lot more done with a call and a tweet than with a call alone.

At the risk of sounding nostalgic, my first experience with

• online payment was in the late '80s when a leading bank who was my customer installed a SWIFT terminal at its so-called "overseas branch"; 
• and with online banking was in the early '90s when my employer installed HSBC's Hexagon system for online corporate banking. 

I fully agree that the basic purpose of online banking / payment remains the same. All innovation lies in the "how", not what, of doing them. And, on that count, I fear that we're actually going back in time because of the increased friction caused by the implementation of ever rising security measures in electronic payments.

I recently found myself unable to pay my mobile phone bills with credit card at the MNO's stores and kiosks. For increased security, the MNO has implemented Mobile OTP to authenticate all card transactions. However, ironically, the MNO can't manage decent network coverage within own premises. So the SMS carrying the OTP never reached me and I had to use cash.

Earlier today, an employee of a travel agency told me that ever since their account got debited twice due to a snafu in online payment, their company has taken a policy decision to make all payments by cash. One of their employees goes to a bank branch every day, deposits cash and collects a paper challan as proof of payment. No doubt a roundabout way of leading life but their blood pressure has apparently become normal since then. And to ensure that I paid them in cash as well, they discouraged me from using my credit card with a 2.15% surcharge.

Not sure why a loyalty program needs any credit card data in the first place, let alone inclusive of CVV #s. Through the years, I've enrolled for PAYBACK, Nectar and some dozen more loyalty programs. I don't recall submitting - nor any one of them asking - any credit card data at any stage. Therefore, it'd be interesting to learn from where LoyaltyBuild got all this credit card data and, in the process of receiving it, if all EU Data Protection laws complied with.

At first, mobile wallets were supposed to render credit cards obsolete. Then came the realization that they could at best hope to render the plastic form factor of credit cards obsolete. The current debate about magstripe versus chip seems adequate testimony that even plastic is here to stay.

I went through a double coincidence w.r.t StanChart in the past half hour: 

I completed an online application for a StanChart credit card. I heaved a sigh of relief when I reached the documentation section of the application. I didn't have to fumble around scanning and uploading several pages of required documents on to their website. They're going to send a person over to my house to collect all that in hard copy form. I found this to be a good example of omnichannel banking - do on the web what the web is strong at, do face to face what face to face is strong at. 

I just read this article about SQUARE's approach to product design: "At Square, ..., the goal is not necessarily to supplant the tools we use on a daily basis, but to make them more useful. The original Square device, for example, didn’t bundle in NFC for wireless payments, but instead made accepting (plastic) credit cards easier. This approach — to augment and reshape our current technology rather than replace it - has thus far been working for Square." 

StanChart's approach resonates well with SQUARE's and I'm sure it will work as well for StanChart as it has for SQUARE.

@BrettK:

While I love all your theories about the purpose of cash, consumer behavior and so on, I can't ignore ground reality, which is that the volume of cash in circulation been rising and will continue to increase at least until 2022.    

BORDERS and BLOCKBUSTER are just two companies. Their fates don't say too much about the popularity of brick-and-mortar-stores versus online stores or physical goods versus digital goods. The last decade has probably seen more Internet companies shutting down than traditional ones. For all the hype, ecommerce has still not even managed to grab a 10% share of retail sales in the USA (and much less in many other developed nations) despite being in existence for almost 20 years. A pure play Internet company like Warby Parker has felt the need to set up physical stores. 

There's no denying that consumer behavior is all important. The very fact that cash is still around despite so many shifts in consumer behavior over the centuries actually proves that cash is able to cater to the preferences of a wide variety of consumer behavior patterns. For example, it has even entered ecommerce and etickets via Cash on Delivery payment mode. I see no reason to believe that cash will suddenly lose its versatility as buying ecosystems change going forward. 

@JohnC:

In this day and age of realtime wire transfers across offshore locations and huge fines slapped on banks for money laundering via noncash payment methods, I tend to think that a lot more criminal activity happens via electronic payments than cash.

The central theme of this post is whether and when the Zero Cash Day will arrive. While you may not lose sleep over it - neither do I, for that matter - there are many others who probably will.

@PatC:

In addition to clarifying that Proximity Correlation Logic® (PCL) is not based on GPS, it'd help have a more meaningful discussion if you did throw some light on what it is based on (SMS or USSD?), whether it needs data connectivity, and so on.

It'd also help have a more meaningful discussion if you specified the baseline condition under which you've observed 98% False Positives before the introduction of PCL. If it's "Decline 100% of overseas transactions", I must say that none of my credit card issuers follow such a practice. And no amount of technology will save a bank that adopts such a "throw the baby out with the bathwater" kind of practice. 

I presume that PCL needs the same SIM. In talking about 2-Way SMS Alert, I've assumed the same. So, the SMS message would indeed reach the cardholder and at no cost to her. 

Why should the transaction "already be declined" by the time the cardholder receives the SMS unless the baseline condition is to "Decline all overseas transactiions", which, as I said earlier, doesn't match my personal experience.

Virtual Agents like Jenn come closest in name and function to Debbie. More at How Humanlike Are Virtual Agents? on my personal blog.

Banks have had access to branch, phone and web transaction history for eons. Yet how many of them have succeeded in leveraging all that big data to generate additional revenue streams via targeted offers? As a matter of fact, how many success stories exist in that space even among MNOs and other nonbanks? IMHO, data alone is not a compelling reason for banks - or nonbanks - to enter mobile wallets. Even taking Starbucks, while most of mobile wallet spend happened at Starbucks, 90% of payments at Starbucks happened via cash and plastic cards, as I'd highlighted in Mobile Wallet Has Few Takers - Even At Starbucks. When mobile wallet is itself losing the payment war, there's hardly any point in debating which specific product will win the mobile wallet battle.

Many people - including me - tend to use different, lower cost SIMs while traveling abroad. GPS is not very reliable indoors. Because it drains battery rapidly, some people - including me - keep GPS switched off except while using the smartphone for navigation. These are formidable hurdles in front of proximity correlation. Against that backdrop, the only way I can bring myself to believe that this technology has "slashed the number of 'false positives' on overseas transactions by up to 70%" is if the bank simplistically rejected all overseas transactions as being fraudulent. Personally, I find 2-way SMS Alerts to be a more reliable yet lower cost solution.