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@ElizabethL:

You're absolutely right. I've written a couple of posts on Finextra about how customers wanting quick resolution to their issues from banks should ping their banks on social media. I got a taste of what's happening on the other side when I met this bank yesterday. It already a team of people to spot and respond to every tweet sent to it. Over the past few months, it has witnessed a surge in volume of messages over social media and has recognized the shortcoming with its labor-only approach of responding to them. As a result, the bank has decided to adopt a realtime social intelligence solution that not only overcomes these limitations but also enables it to respond to social media messages at the 5-minute speed and 24 x 7 X 365 working hours of the Internet.

On the other hand, I've logged complaints with many "disruptors" like PayPal over six months ago. I'm sure I'll get a reply within my lifetime.

When you say, "...within ten minutes, the lobby was empty of all but three.", did you mean that all but three customers left the branch after completing or abandoning their kiosk transaction? Your next sentence seems to suggest that they gave up on the kiosk.

On another note, each channel has its own strengths. Supporting all activities on all channels (multichannel support) is neither possible nor required. Studies have shown that a majority of customers want the ability to move between channels based on their perception of the relative strengths of each channel - what I'd call "Omnichannel Banking". More on this in my 3-part personal blog post titled "Jumping On The Omnichannel Bandwagon".

@ElizabethL:

Great post. You've hit the nail on the head so many times that I lose count but I specifically wanted to call out your points about (1) elimination of banks from the payment equation and (2) SQUARE / clones since they also happened to be the key focus of my opinion article titled "Impact of Regulation on Financial Services Providers" appearing in the Aug. 2012 issue of  The Journal of Internet Banking & Commerce.

Far from disrupting banks, most of the payment startups will vanish overnight if banks stop operating the banking rails.

SQUARE / clones expand the use of cards and thereby enlarge the interchange pool for banks. So, they're allies – not adversaries – of banks and your observation that "MasterCard and Amex were jumping over each other to snuggle up with iZettle on stage" just proves the point.

@FinextraM: TY for putting things in perspective and providing the clarity that eluded me so far. Let alone interest rate, when a loan is rejected, bankers will simply tell applicants, "system decision". If they can't own up their decisions, they should at least be forced by legislation to share the underlying data with customers. Having said that, it's not going to be easy to draw a clear line between what must be shared and what can be held back as trade secret. We certainly don't want IT-savvy customers demanding to see the source code of the system that denied their loan application!

If the leading US retailer TARGET could figure out that A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did, I've no problem believing your claim about the UK grocery superstore's capability with detecting marital discord! But, as we transition from retailers to banks, the underlying business model changes the nature of datasets available to banks versus retailers and the extent of insights they can glean by using data mining or predictive analytics. Let alone pregnancy or divorce predictions, banks can't even make an elementary targeted offer like "Get 20% off on Coke with your purchase of pizza" since they lack any spend info for customers paying by cash and, even for card-using customers, they lack SKU-wise spend info - which are all available to retailers.

@AlexeyA: I just noticed - the second screenshot has a Facebook button and the third one has the share button. Just wondering if the next update with social sharing functionality is already out!

Not sure what I'm missing here but don't customers already have access to all their data periodically via monthly statements and on-demand via portals? If "electronic machine-readable standard format" is the operating term here, I've been able to download statements in industry-standard formats (e.g. CSV, XLS, QIF, OFX) from all my banks for several years now. I do agree that the same is not always the case with TELCOs and UTILITIES. And given that this article mentions, "Lloyds Banking Group, MasterCard and Visa are among the big firms in the finance, energy and telecoms sectors", the outlook doesn't seem bright there: Quite funny that three financial services companies have to provide cover to the lack of any telecom or energy company!

Luckily for Wallaby, Mint, BillGuard and many other services that store card and / or Internet Banking access credentials - including the now defunct OfferMatic - customers in their primary market don't seem to ask such questions! No wonder 2FA, EMV, out-of-band authentication and many other security technologies that are hot topics in the rest of the world haven't taken off there.

Ah, after months of voicing this view, it feels good to know that someone of the stature of IDC also believes that mobile payments will run on banking rails and not disintermediate financial institutions, even five years from now.

Now that it's amply clear that banks and credit card accounts aren't going away anytime soon, banks already carry a sizable inventory of offers from merchants and already earn some revenues through their current, and arguably, "spray-and-pray" type of campaigns. Mobile payments will help them target their offers better and hopefully boost conversions. It remains to be seen whether the incremental revenues they gain as a result will by itself nudge them to share a slice of their interchange fees with mobile wallet providers, who otherwise don't seem to have any concrete source of revenues.

Before someone charges me with providing the trigger for turning this into a BT product and services bulletin, my only comment about BT v. SWIFT pertained to nimbleness / customer-centricity, and that was based on my experience as a customer of both companies. I'm sure there are enough BT and SWIFT customers in Finextra Community and they're free to post their unbiased views about their experiences with them. My questions about the range of overlap of products and services with SWIFT's pertained to the hitherto - and still - unnamed "commercial networks", not BT.