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Until now, I thought mobile wallets were the height of convolutedness in using a mobile phone instead of a plastic card but this one by NCR beats that hollow by taking convolutedness to new heights. But, I won't be surprised if proves to be a big hit among the segment of population that is already exposed to smartphones but is not yet old enough to become eligible for credit / debit cards. In all likelihood, these pre-adult GenYers will never learn how unconvoluted it has been for people to use cards at ATMs during the previous 40-50 years. To them, ATM + Smartphone might be the most natural combination. I see some parallels between this and the choice of email - desktop (e.g. Outlook) versus webmail (e.g. GMail) - between GenXers and adult GenYers. 

Just so that my previous comments are clear, ICICI Bank exemplifies a different usage scenario, one in which said beneficiary doesn't have a card at all since s/he doesn't have an account with said bank. The use of mobile in this context is complementary to card, not as replacement to it. This product expands the market and earns fees for said bank and is not an example of a security mechanism. To me, supplementing cards by mobile / barcode is great, but not replacing the former by the latter.

The NatWest link took me to a page that described how NatWest's customers could make cardless cash withdrawals from its ATMs. I admit that the use cases mentioned in the article for such a service - lost or stolen card - are valid but this service is hardly revolutionary or even forward-looking.

On the other hand, let me take the example of a product offered by ICICI Bank for over 4-5 years. Here, an ICICI Bank customer initiates a P2P payment via ICICI Bank. The bank sends an authorization code via SMS to the beneficiary, who doesn't have to be an ICICI customer. The beneficiary simply visits the nearest ICICI Bank ATM, enters the PIN and cashes-out the payment. ICICI Bank enables a P2P payment virtually in realtime even to the unbanked or customers of competing banks and makes a tidy fee in the bargain. While not revolutionary, this product expands the footprint of bank-driven retail payments and is self-funding. 

All 'open loop' digital wallets from competing vendors can be used across a variety of establishments that accept Visa / MasterCard. That being the case, aren't they 'open' enough as it is? While 'closed loop' digital wallets surely have a greater challenge finding mainstream adoption, banking regulations in India and a few other countries currently don't permit 'open loop' digital wallets from nonbanks.

These figures don't portend too bright a future for mobile walllets, do they?

@NickC & @ArunA: Thank you for your comments.

@ArunA: LBS is only one example of a non-NFC technology that permits realtime interaction via "geo-fenced" offers. Here, I agree with what you say about the need for the LBS service to be on. In fact, I'd go one step further and claim that, given rapid battery depletion problem in many smartphones when GPS / LBS is on, geo-fenced offer technology is unlikely to reach mainstream adoption for a while. However, non-NFC technologies include others that are based on credit cards. As long as the consumer pays via a certain enrolled credit card at a certain merchant, s/he automatically gets a realtime offer in her / his mobile phone. There's no need for any LBS service to be on. In fact, for SMS-based offers, there's no need for any mobile app to be on. For non-SMS-based offers, the rewards app has to be on, but that's no different from the NFC situation where the mobile wallet app must be on. Besides, in an NFC situation involving Google Wallet - not sure about ISIS though - the consumer must have opted in to receive offers from merchants in the first place, so a merchant can't unilaterally take control and bombard the consumer with offers.

@HenryW:

In case you're a customer of ICICI Bank outside India, the Facebook App is possibly not available for your account category, which is probably why you haven't heard about it. It's available for resident Indian savings account holders like me and I did get two emails from ICICI Bank announcing the launch of its FB app.

The ICICI Bank FB app makes you jump several hoops before you can sign up for it, effectively ruling out account  hijacking by anyone who only knows my FB password. It also demands a 4-digit PIN number for logging you in each time - this is after you've successfully logged into FB using your regular FB password. Therefore, even if someone hacks into my FB account, they can't access my ICICI Bank FB app. By following such an architecture, there's no need for banks to put their social media plans on hold due to the recent LinkedIn incident. However, I recognize it, when it comes to these decisions, perceptions matter more than the nitty gritty of the actual transactional flow, so anything is possible.

This article reinforces what I've been saying, namely, that Visa is doing what all sponsors are entitled to do, and have always been doing, according to their sponsorship agreements; also that the "...(OFT) is currently looking into this matter along with the European Commission. They are in discussion together concerning these issues and are going to make a decision concerning what action, if any, should be taken." I'll await that decision and then decide whether there's any merit in continuing this discussion - whether online or offline.

Child labor is illegal, not just anti-social. If banishing non-Visa from London Olympics is similarly illegal, Visa should be stopped and I'm sure it will be stopped. But, that doesn't seem to be the case. Most business owners need their companies to be profitable first. If their companies also become great, it's, well, great. Honestly, I don't know why Addison Lee made the decision to forgo the extra profits. The 'who' does matter - maybe Addison Lee doesn't have to answer to shareholders or keep a watch on its share price every quarter? Visa and most other listed companies don't have that luxury. 

Maybe my nomadic lifestyle has exposed me to many more banks than the average person, but across 6-7 banks that I've banked with in the last few years, I've found around 50% of the items in your wish list, albeit on a single channel:

1. Notifications. SMS Alerts for all forms of card use - credit card at POS, debit card at ATM, and so on - have become mandatory for all banks in India since 2011. More in my Finextra post "How Banks Can Differentiate By Going The Extra Mile - Part 1".
2. Activity Streams. Although restricted to Internet Banking, Citi UK has a good summary of everything that happened during that session.

While many people attribute the lack of a 360 degree customer view and the absence of seamless multichannel interactions to different silos in banks, I think the root cause of these problems lies elsewhere. To reduce operating costs, many banking activities are outsourced to different vendors. Due to security restrictions, the outsourcers are not provided fully fledged access to multiple internal systems managing these activities. Until this changes - and I suspect that it never will for a long time - I doubt if notifications and activity streams about multiple products can ever be provided over multiple channels.