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First time I remember reading an article about this obscure, but very valuable, product offered by bank branches. While on this subject, an interesting nugget: SDLs offered by independent nonbanking companies are frozen if the company declares bankruptcy. Apparently, while the content of the lockers don't belong to the company, the locker itself does, hence customers are locked out off their valuables under such a circumstance. Yet another reason why SDLs make a lot of sense for banks.

A midsize private sector bank in India has recently launched a mobile banking app that can display account balance - and forex rates and a few other pieces of information - without logon. It has left the decision on whether balance should be displayed with or without password to the customer. Very smart move, IMO. Interestingly, although the bank's core banking vendor has a mobile banking solution, the bank chose to go with a pure-play mobile banking vendor. Apparently, the bank's decision was influenced largely by the latter's greater sensitivity to customer preferences and its ability to come up with a suitable architecture that achieved the required tradeoff between convenience and security.

@AlexP:

You abandoned the transaction at exactly the right point. I went through a similar experience in a slightly different context. As I'd highlighted in my personal blog post The Everlasting One Minute written at the time, you'd likely have been asked to submit your original - repeat, original - passport for verification as the next step and, that too, by snail mail. I'd abandoned my transaction at this stage.  

While more details can be found in the two hyperlinked blog posts, a couple of learnings from India's CTS2010 program are:

• Better branding of the program
• Treating payers as defaulters when their old non-CTS2010 compliant cheques bounce (unless they can prove that they've replaced their old cheques with new CTS2010-compliant ones) 
• Not slapping "cheque return" fees on payees under such circumstances. 

While on this topic, the date of cutover to CTS2010 in India has been postponed twice. The current deadline is 31 July 2013. I'm still continuing to watch this space. 

Concerns around cloud are a secondary issue: In a study we recently conducted, we found that cumulative cloud subscription fees exceed onpremise license fees after 36-48 months even after accounting for 20% per year AMC for onpremise software. Considering that onpremise license fees cover the entire lifetime of the software, which could be 8-10 years, cloud makes business sense only for banks and other businesses that can't afford the capex associated with onpremise software. For larger companies that can, the business case for cloud / SaaS is highly questionable. This is even before taking into account SLA, integration, security and other attributes on which onpremise scores ahead of cloud. IMHO, in midsize to large banks and enterprises, cloud will be restricted to "white space apps" for the foreseeable future.

Isn't Cheque Truncation already there in the UK? As with many other technologies, one advantage of starting late is the ability to avoid the mistakes made by others. 

CTS-2010: Cheque Truncation Or Contract Termination 

CTS2010 Compliant Or Not?

By the time the next GFC happens, I hope the alternative financial system, of which BitCoin is the flag bearer, becomes big enough so that governments won't need to bailout banks to restore public confidence in the expanded financial system. If that happens, BitCoin will have contributed more to the stability of the global financial system than Dodd-Frank-Durbin, Basel-III and reams of other regulations that came into effect in the wake of the last GFC.

Let's take a new entrant like GoBank. Its website makes it very clear that it's a "brand of Green Dot Bank, Member FDIC". It's somewhat similar with Simple also. So, they're agents of traditional banks. Even if they become very successful, they won't pose any existential threats to traditional banks. In fact, they'd only advance their cause.

The Amazon versus highstreet bookstore analogy is not valid since Amazon is neither owned by nor is a reseller of any highstreet bookstore. A more appropriate analogy in this context is the principle-reseller relationship that exists in IT, FMCG, telecom and many other industries viz. Just because I buy a Lenovo laptop from an Amazon or a Flipkart or a BestBuy than from Lenovo directly doesn't mean Lenovo will be dead. Ditto for a Dove soap or Crest toothpaste bought at Target or Asda or via Ocado - Unilever and P&G are very much alive and kicking, thank you. 

Looking beneath the hood, instead of positioning GoBank and Simple as the mobile banking apps they are, their respective owner banks have done a very smart thing by elevating the "branch is dead" hype to the "bank is dead" positioning and using the "mobile-only" approach. It will resonate well with the GenY and any others who purportedly hate banks and love mobile, eventually enticing them back to, ahem, the same old traditional banks, except via mobile and not branch. If it were not for this, traditional banks might have lost this segment to prepaid cards, many of which are not owned by them. So, whether the new crop of am-I-a-bank-or-am-I-not-a-bank upstarts succeed or fail, it will be banks who'll eventually go laughing all the way to the, er, bank. Won't be the first time this happened.

After doing such strategic stress tests, a bank shouldn't forget to test for stress at tactical levels. As I'd highlighted in a post titled About Technology “Stress Tests” In Liquidity Risk Management published on my personal blog, banks face day-to-day liquidity risks from technical instability, inaccurate reference data and other mundane but critical problems in their IT landscape, which they can mitigate by including technology within the scope of their stress tests.

No, it'd probably end up further alienating customers who're already tired of friction and frustrated with false positives involved in most biometrics-based security systems. As I'd highlighted in my comment to this post, voice and fingerprint based access control is either too costly or too unreliable, with the author of the post reporting that her fingerprint scanner worked only 2% of the time. Of course, things could be different if voice biometrics systems starts delivering higher reliability and lower false positives without costing much more than they do at present.