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Typing a username and a password is painful enough on a touchscreen. 3FA is unthinkably excruciating. This is not just my personal opinion. After the regulator made 2FA mandatory for mobile shopping in India, the channel has been all but decimated. The way I see it, security concerns are just a bogey. When people get value, they don't mind giving away their banking access credentials to startups like Mint, BillGuard and others. IMO, the slow offtake of mobile banking owes itself to the way it's currently designed to be an extension of Internet Banking, which lacks compelling value. If mobile banking exploits smartphone's features like camera, GPS and accelerometer to support features - viz. Mobile RDC - that are simply not possible on a PC, then it's likely to find far greater traction. GoBank is trying exactly that.

Paying for parking with a mobile phone is certainly a great use case for GYMPS / Carrier Billing mobile payment although it doesn't qualify as a mobile wallet in the strictest sense of the term. Leaving that aside, MNOs charge merchants as much as 20% transaction fees for Carrier Billing, which explains why it hasn't become so ubiquituous, as I'd highlighted in this Finextra post:

Banks Have Nothing To Fear From TELCOs

I was right about not holding my breath but way too wrong about the reason for doing so. Even leading banks seem to be a long way from getting the basic technology right, let alone figuring out a revenue model: I'd enrolled for a PFM offered by a Top 3 Indian private sector bank and connected it to my Facebook account to leverage the service's social features. Today, I received an email from the bank asking me to reconnect my account with Facebook since they disabled all external connections during a recent platform upgrade. Not sure about the other users of this service, but I've abandoned this service forthwith. With SaaS software typically going through 3-4 upgrades every month, I don't fancy myself having to waste time re-establishing external connections so frequently. And, I almost forgot to mention that, in the last 2-3 months that I've been a user of this service, I never received a single alert / offer from it.

Interesting point. If I play this forward a little, I see Corporate entities asking their shareholders to "Follow" them on Twitter and LinkedIn and / or "Like" them on Facebook if they want to receive corporate data on time. This could prove a low hanging fruit for corporates to garner followers and likes on social media, thus resulting in the bell tolling also for digital marketing agencies who charge big bucks to corporates for doing this today.

After putting through some 20 transactions and finding my iTunes balance nearly depleted, I have to go back to a bank / card product like credit card to topup my iTunes balance. Bank / card networks get back into the act. If I were a bank, I'd prefer this one big ticket transaction - and interchange revenue - to 20 small value transactions. On the other hand, if I topup my iTunes balance with iTunes gift card purchased with cash, banks might not be involved but iTunes would become a cash based method of payment and lose relevance in this discussion about electronic payments. 

@FinextraM: TY for your comment. There are many articles blaming lack of EMV for this incident but, as this Fed article makes clear, "the fact that 94 percent of the ATM cash withdrawals took place at ATMs outside the United States shows that we (USA) are not the non-EMV island that we are often portrayed as." Personally, I'd await info on which data centers were involved before linking the security vulnerabilities exploited in this heist to Windows / Linux. Until we know more, we can't be sure that they aren't mainframes or Unix systems!

It's precisely 0.57% but contactless as a % of *all card* transactions is somewhat misleading since contactless can be used only up to a certain max transaction size in most parts of Europe. A more valid metric would be contactless as a % of *eligible card* transactions and, to me, 10% or more would signify a watershed moment. An even more revealing metric would be contactless as a % of *eligible cash* transactions.

Good post, covers the underexposed area of conversion rate optimization. We've noticed that retargeting is extremely effective - if a bit creepy to some people at start - for ecommerce including banks selling financial products online. While remarketing only works on a relatively small segment of website visitors who have logged on, retargeting even brings anonymous visitors back to a website and gives merchants another shot at converting them to customers. For many verticals, anonymous visitors consitute a lion's share of a website's total visitors, thus helping retargeting deliver very high Return On Advertising Spend. For example, we know an airline that generates $35 in incremental sales for every $1 spent on retargeting, making retargeting its #1 digital marketing channel.

This is a cross-border fraud. Many people don't use the regular SIM of their mobile phones while traveling abroad due to exorbitant international roaming costs. Any authentication based on "registered mobile phone" simply won't work. Besides, given patchy mobile connections indoors, in congested places and while on roaming mode, I fail to see how this technology won't lead to greater false-positive rates. While EMV will help, it's not so 'simple'! I've a hunch that we don't need any additional technology to prevent such frauds. But I'll await feedback on the questions I've raised around standard operating procedures in my following post:

Why Is This Data Breach Different?

"To gird for battle, Moynihan is reconfiguring thousands of branches from sales-and-teller outlets into full-service centers that offer a wide range of sophisticated products and advice." This and many more extracts from this recent FORTUNE magazine interview with BofA's CEO should put to rest any doubts that BofA is reenergizing "BofA's core business and historical strength: branch banking". It's still possible to reconcile Celent's guidance with the reality prevailing on the ground by recognizing that many banks - including BofA itself - are trying to push their "mass retail" customer segment to lower cost mobile banking after Frank-Dodd-Durbin made them unprofitable while, at the same time, bolstering their branch networks to attract and retain their profitable "mass affluent" customer segment.