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As a part of bolstering financial literacy among school going children, my daughter was given a project where she had to visit a bank branch and find out details of various types of accounts, interest rates, opening formalities, and so on. She went with her mother to the branch of the bank where my wife and I have accounts for over a decade and my daughter herself has a "minor account" for a couple of years. Far from being greeted by their names, the branch staff shooed them away and told them to visit the bank's website to find out more. I guess they are so drunk on the digital channel Kool-Aid that they won't be able to spot a customer even if one walked in through their front door.

Good list. Unlike retail, telecom and other industries, banks face a major challenge in that banking products are bought relatively infrequently e.g. mortgage. While it's easy to send offers on mortgages to all customers on all months of the year, it's very hard - well nigh impossible - to send one to that customer on that month that he plans to buy a house. In other words, making relevant offers is particularly difficult in banking. We've come across this issue with virtually every bank we work with. We've found one approach that works well in overcoming this challenge is to focus on "sub-products". For example, when a customer charges an amount on her credit card that's many times of her normal card spend, offer repayment by EMIs. Such offers are highly relevant and easy to devise. They can happen frequently and tend to enjoy high conversions.

Offers for third-party products (e.g. 20% off on Coke when customer buys a pizza on his credit card at the POS) is another approach. 

@JohnC: TY for your comment. I'm aware of plastic contactless cards and have used them myself at Starbucks and elsewhere. But my comment pertained to the following line in the article: "The firm's mobile app has proven a huge success...". As you can see, it specifically references the mobile app, not contactless cards.

I'm all for "socializing" with my bank provided there's value and must have been one of the earliest adopters of ICICI Bank's FB app. I just wish the access rights requested by banks (and other third parties) are a little less broadbased and obfuscatory: If I want to use FB Connect to log on to a website - to sidestep the need for "yet another username and password" - I don't know why I have to grant the website permission to "read your posts" or "post as you". Like you, I've heard many people say that they've rarely, if ever, clicked on a Google Ad. Yet Google AdWords delivers 94% of Google's revenues and 98% of its profits. So, it must be working for some one!

According to personal experience and anecdotal evidence, customers are bound to want to access their bank accounts from a variety of "devices" including branch, but not necessarily to do the same thing. In my view, different channels have different strengths (e.g. branch is great for handling documentation) and different banking needs have different frequencies (e.g. no one really wants to open a fixed deposit every day but every one might want to check their account balances every day, especially in outer space after having paid big bucks to Virgin Galactic to get there!), so omnichannel - rather than multichannel - banking might strike the right balance between cost and benefit for a bank. Definitions and examples for omnichannel and multichannel can be found in the three part blog post titled Jumping On The Omnichannel Bandwagon (hyperlink removed) on my company blog.

My experience - described in my personal blog post titled Why B2B Suppliers Should Accept Credit Cards (hyperlink removed) - endorses your finding. But, that was two years ago. With BitCoin looking like a viable alternative, especially for cross-border transactions, I'm beginning to have second thoughts.

By the standards of mobile wallets, Starbucks' is no doubt a huge hit in the USA. But, unless my calculation (ow.ly/lNKVk) misses something, only 1 out of 25 Starbucks customers uses its mobile app to make payments. Does that make it a "huge success"?

Wonder if the Chatham House Rule is slowly taking root in Finextra :) Anyway, the debate has shifted to the cost-benefit / risk-return proposition of mobile / NFC / contactless payments. To return to the M&S scenario, I doubt if it matters to a man on the street whether the POS software is correctly written or not - in the opinion of an anonymous Finextra member or anyone else. IMHO, what counts is that a reputed company like M&S has certified the POS for use at its store. When such a POS could potentially cause a problem - of exactly the nature I'd described in my comment here - switching to another retailer is overreacting. Turning wary of contactless is sensible.

Sorry, fixed the above hyperlink. It's ow.ly/lNKVk

@EricS: Spot on +1. In all this hype about technology, many of us - including me - tend to forget what really matters. According to my calculations, 24 out of 25 Starbucks customers don't use its mobile wallet for making payments. Surely, Starbucks still can't make espressos fast enough?!