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Technology is currently available to enable banks - and other types of billers - to craft offers ("TransPromos") at an extremely granular level and target them at a "customer segment of one", as I'd pointed out in my Finextra post Save Costs But Lose Revenues With eBills And eStatements. Bank of America is one bank that has publicly announced its plans of making such offers using currently available technology.

The original article had terms like "others" and "children". To me, "Others" means, well, "others", meaning people who had accounts in some other banks, unless otherwise specified, and "children" means too young to qualify for a bank account. Besides, generating a code and calling up the intended beneficiary to convey it - "out of band" of sorts - is how Western Union and ICICI Bank apps work. Which is why I felt that this service from RBS/NatWest permits P2P transfers to non-customers. However, after seeing no mention of non-customers on their website, I've my doubts! 

ATM and POS transactions, system logs, error messages, card spends - big data of this nature has been around for a long time in financial services. Added to that, there's now social media mentions and many other sources of big data. Vendors of big data solutions - e.g. Twitter Sentiment analysis - need to demonstrate to financial institutions that their technologies can be used to store and process big data to deliver actionable insights rather than lead to "analysis-paralysis". It's also incumbent upon them to show how their technologies can filter out the "big noise" that's inevitably a part of big data. Continuing with the same Twitter Sentiment analysis example, less than 10% of tweets about a company / brand have relevance, so the Twitter Sentiment analysis solution must be capable of not only figuring out the 90% but also discarding them so that they don't clog the system resources. 

While in-app payment does make the process more seamless, the merchant will have to give away 30% of the transaction value to Apple. This could prove a dampener for this API.

Hope someone from RBS / NatWest will clarify. Their website for this service, GetCash, is silent on this point. 

The "get cash to others" is a compelling use case (assuming that "others" don't need to be customers of RBS+NatWest). In short, this service seems to permit realtime P2P money transfers from an RBS+NatWest customer to a non-customer who can cash-out simply at an RBS+NatWest ATM without having to have a smartphone, scan a QR code, enroll for a service, or otherwise jump several hoops. So, this service is painless. It's too time-consuming to crack a 6-digit PIN by brute force. In any case, the ATM is subject to video surveillance. So, this service is also secure. Props to RBS+NatWest for launching it. I'm sure it will have many more usage scenarios than parents-children. 

@UriR:

Great pair of websites. Thanks for profiling them!

After a very quick and dirty test with a couple of passwords, I've jumped to the following conclusion which fellow readers might want to accept on faith or reject outright: Passwords in foreign (i.e. non-English) languages are impossible to crack, though easier to remember (in case you know only a few foreign words).

No problems @AlexanderP. You might want to correct the one next to "piece of cake" as well. 

You're probably right about the relevance of voice recognition in healthcare, government education, sports gambling and other apps. But, the functionality set currently offered in many mobile banking apps - a/c balance, last 5 transactions, mini statement, fund transfer, etc. - is so sparse that the icons are located comfortably apart on the screen, even in relatively small (2-3") screens, so fat finger is not a big problem. Of course, all that could change in the next generation of mobile banking apps and voice recognition could become important for them.

Beware: People might give your solution a piece of their mind until your solution gives them peace of mind.