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Props for such a balanced view about the role of bank branches. While many digital pundits and research analysts may find it fashionable to write branches off, contrasting actions by banks serve as beacons for the future. SBI, India's largest bank, recently decided to keep branches open on Sundays to handle the extra volume of business - despite offering Internet Banking for close to 10 years and mobile banking for around three. Both M&S and Metro, latest entrants to the UK banking scene, have put their weight behind plush and welcoming branches.

Interestingly, a different picture might emerge if we hear what bankers themselves say: After leaving my earlier comment yesterday, I read a newspaper article reporting that SBI, India's largest bank, is going to keep its branches open even on Sundays. No less than the Chairman of the bank was quoted as saying that the bank is doing this to increase "banking and business". This makes a lot of sense: With increasing regulations around KYC and other areas, customer acquisition - account opening, mortgage approvals, etc. - can increasingly be completed only by visiting the branch. Maybe more people are availing themselves of banking who feel more comfortable onboarding on to a new service via branch; maybe Finextra readers - including me - aren't representative of the average bank customer; whatever. But, on the rare occasions that I've visited a branch, I've seen queues only getting longer and longer. To me, that's a truer predictor of future trends than any number of analyst reports. 

On the same day I read this article, I receive my bank statement which says "to update your email address, please visit our branch". Just another irony of e/m-Banking, I guess. 

I remember reading a recent article in Finextra, according to which GenY visit branches, but find them closed. 

The relative lack of traction for bank-run P2FM services is often ascribed to the unwillingness of their customers to even share their banking transactions with other banks with them. Not sure how many of them would like their banks to know their social interactions and non-banking transactions - even assuming a mobile banking app made all that possible.

According to the World Retail Banking Report 2012 co-authored by Cap Gemini and EFMA, customers are viewing the branch and Internet as the two most important channels of retail banking worldwide. IMHO, each channel has its own strengths. There's enough room for all of them to coexist. What banks could do is to support omnichannel banking.

I did think of your point regarding company and BoD being two different entities. Neither am I a lawyer, but I think only of the two entities can be named the defendant, so only one of them can be punished. If the BoD is punished per Branch A and B, government gets no fines from the company. If the BoD is fined in addition to attracting Branch A and B punishment, I'm sure they'll file for bankruptcy and again the government will be left with nothing. When punitive damages are awarded against a, say, tobacco company, the general economy is hardly affected. That can't be said of a bank. I agree with you that setting fines for banks is a very dicey affair. Which makes me wonder if there's a practical solution to this problem at all. We seem to be heading towards a "heads, banks win, tails, we lose" kind of a situation yet again!

Just to clarify:

1. Google Checkout is gone. It's now Google Wallet - Online, which is applicable for Web and Mobile. 
2. Erstwhile Google Wallet is now Google Wallet - In-store. 
3. For the Online variant, it was always possible to add any card. By cardholder. Without any involvement of card issuing bank.
4. All limitations and new developments - NFC, Citi, MasterCard, cloud storage, speedening of integration with banks, etc. - are only applicable for the In-store variant of GW.

Since the Online variant of GW has been free of all the limitations afflicting the In-store variant, it would be interesting to know how many subscribers it has managed to attract. And compare that figure with iTunes - only available online - which has around 200M cards on file in order to get a feel for the popularity of Google Wallet.

Unlike most other countries I know of, USA is flush with publicly-available information about its citizens. A quick Google Search of "USA Background Check" will bring up several web services offering a wide range of indexes onscreen or via email / API. Banks can use such services to draw up a shortlist of candidates for further examination quite easily and cost-effectively. While I won't say the same thing for other nations, the task for US citizens is not so complex.

Having broken the law and paid a fine, it's deemed that the defendant has already been punished for the crime. There should be no further punishment for the same crime, since that would constitute "double jeopardy", which is not permitted in most judicial systems. Therefore, while they're well thought out, Branch A and B can't be made into laws where the double jeopardy principle reigns. To me, if the fine is set high enough, that itself would prevent recurrence of the crime, without any additional punishment at the board-level. That doesn't seem to be happening now: Barclays' stock price went up when the amount of fine imposed on it for LiborGate was announced - the City / Wall Street felt that the fine was insignificant compared to the bank's overall size. 

Fraud Loss: GBP 78M. Revenue Loss: GBP 127M (205 - 78), arising from "false positives" in the fraud detection and prevention technology. These figures confirm my perennial hunch that current security technologies are afflicted with so much friction that they cause more loss than they prevent. No wonder not a single US e-tailer I've come across uses VbV or an equivalent 2FA mechanism for CNP transactions.

I've seen some banks in the UK who used to support virtual keyboards on their Internet Banking login screens have now removed them. Could it be because virtual keyboards are more vulnerable to "looking over the shoulder" threat vector?

If the threat of keylogging is really so serious, the Indian regulation imposing 2FA for each and every - not just high-value - CNP transaction is somewhat counterproductive. At least, it appears so based on the precedent of the PATCO v. OCEAN BANK ACH fraud lawsuit in the USA, where the court of appeals found in favor of the plaintiff. One of the major factors that went against the bank was its decision to lower the threshold of its Q&A challenge from US$ 1000 to US$ 1. The bank thought it was improving security  by doing this. But, the court ruled that, with rampant keylogging, keyloggers got many more opportunities to harvest the right answers with a lower threshold! Yet another example of "unintended consequences", I guess...

If you add premise access control - tap your ID card on a reader and the office door opens - as another use case, I think the number of people who use contactless technology every day would explode by at least 5-10X @ one access card for each employee working in IT, manufacturing, banking, retail, healthcare and other companies across the world.