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"Comment from the floor: I recently received a remittance payment into my account. Called bank and they couldn't tell me who sent it, the exchange rate etc etc." To this, let me add my recent experience where the same thing happened even for a domestic payment. My bank shrugs its shoulders saying it hasn't received any more information from the central bank - which runs the ACH-equivalent scheme in India - and I'm left with nowhere to go to find out the sender details. As a consumer, what's frustrating is there's no single point of contact in case of EFTs where such ambiguities are increasingly becoming commonplace. 

A seasoned program manager with over two decades of experience exclusively in the Retail vertical was first put in charge of a transaction banking / payments / cash management program at a Top 5 UK Bank a few years ago. When he heard why the bank had to spend several millions of GBP in implementing an ACTIVE:ACTIVE architecture to ensure automated failover, he mused, "Ah, now I understand, a 5 minute downtime can wreck havoc with a bank's liquidity position whereas it's only a matter of a few T-Shirts lying unsold in the case of a retailer". 

I'm reminded of the above story when I read this question: "...if retail suppliers... can offer an engaging online experience, why not banks?". 

When I want to buy a shirt online, I might want to view it in 360 degrees, turn it upside down, get a feel for its texture, and so on, before I decide which shirt to buy. And the retailer's website should be geared up for letting me do all that. However, as a retail consumer or corporate treasurer, when I want to make a payment, I really don't want to engage, interact or otherwise schmooze with a bank's website - all I want to do is to spend the least amount of time on the website and move on to other things in my busy life. As long as a bank's website lets me do this, it's doing a great job for the given purpose.

So, as a customer of a bank interested in making a payment, here are the specific things I'd like to see on the EFT screen of a bank's website that's missing from most of them today: (1) Let me simply enter the beneficiary name, bank account details and the transer amount (2) Make the reference field length long enough for me to enter all required details so that the beneficiary can figure out why they're receiving this payment (3) Help minimize the likelihood of my entering wrong details or assure me that I can retrieve my payment if I make a genuine mistake. I'd like the bank to figure out which method of payment to use based on my choice of cost and lead time instead of troubling me by making me add beneficiary by type of payment and so forth.

A year after announcement and six months before consumer launch, do we know if myBank's fees for merchants will be much lower than card MDF?

In my last year's Finextra post "Why I Think EBA Clearing's myBank Will Be A Hit", I'd wondered if myBank would be available for intra-country transactions. Do we know now if this is indeed the case? The experience of SEPA SCT and SDD in the intervening period clearly suggests that cross-border, B2C EURO payments are not as widespread as hitherto assumed, so myBank might be able to achieve mainstream adoption only if it supports and promotes itself for domestic payments as well.

Transformation during Post Merger Integration was an attractive proposition during the GFC when several takeovers of banks happened. In principle, transformation during compliance is equally attractive. But, it is far more difficult to realize in the latter case since regulations seem to happen in drip feed. By the time FIs absorb the full scope of the compliance program, deadline pressures are too severe for them to do much else than simply achieve compliance. 

At least someone is able to monetize Faster Payments! On second thoughts, Wonga's transfers to SMEs via FPS might qualify as business payments / DCA, yielding fees to the transferring bank as well. 

I'd let the customers decide whether eBilling / eStatementing is more convenient and adds value to them.

@MartinB:

Not so fast...

Up until 10 years ago, even the so-called oligopoly of MasterCard / Visa / AmEx would have permitted you to do exactly what PayPal permits you to do today: Avoid using any realtime fraud detection and prevention screens, permit every card transaction to go through as long it doesn't bust the credit limit, slap the merchant with chargeback if there's the slightest whiff of fraud later on.

Later, the oligopoly - but not PayPal - implemented fraud detection, then fraud detection and prevention, solutions to restore a balance between the rights and privileges of consumers and merchants. (Which is perhaps why millions of physical stores accept the oligopoly's credit cards today but don't accept PayPal). Unfortunately, with additional layers of security, friction increases and most of these systems are beset with false positives, of which your situation is a classic example. Systems that try to resolve these false positives manually / automatically fail if people use different SIMs from their registered mobile phone numbers to avoid exorbitant international roaming charges. Others that try to do so by requiring manual intervention won't work if the call for action arrives when people are asleep.  

I think realtime fraud detection and prevention of card transactions is a Holy Grail that has still not been cracked. But, PayPal is not the solution either. For now, I'm now convinced that the most optimal solution is 2-way SMS Alerts that almost always allow the transaction to go through but provide a simple way for the cardholder to flag it off as a fraud either in realtime or few hours later. Banks in India have implemented 1-way Realtime SMS Alerts that at least half way to the optimum solution. I've written about both types of alerts in my Finextra blog post How Banks Can Differentiate By Going The Extra Mile - Part 2. But, even they will fail if people use a different SIM while traveling abroad.  

PS: Since you've brought up PayPal in the context of a physical store, I'm curious to know if Apple Store accepts PayPal and where all you've managed to use PayPal in a card present situation so far. Apart from a few pilots in Home Depot stores, I haven't even come across any physical store accepting PayPal.

@AdenD:

Clearly, Mint is the winner in PFM and Yodlee, in account aggregation. Their respective leadership positions are not necessarily mutually exclusive. While a PFM user might perceive them as silos, they're not standards organizations. Their silos are the source of their competitive advantage and are bound to be there. 

Your observations about relatively lax security standards in the US apply for more than just Internet Banking: I haven't come across a single merchant in the US who uses VbV or other 2FA security for CNP transactions; It's the only market I know in which there's an ACH transaction - called TEL, if I'm not mistaken - that allows a merchant to pull out money from someone else's bank account with the mere knowledge of the account details (only if there's a dispute later does the merchant have to provide evidence of having obtained those account details legitimately). Yet, I've never come across any figures stating that fraud loss as a percentage of transaction value is higher in the US than other nations that use much greater security.

We've this extremely interesting situation in India where the banking regulator is purportedly making online and mobile payments more and more safe for consumers by adding layer after layer of security and consumers using 'cash on delivery' as #1 method of payment for online shopping!

@JamesVD:

Thank you for your comment. Your research resonates well with my personal observations among GenY's preference for social media banking. 

@MartinB:

According to this Finextra article titled Misys taps social media location information for bank-to-customer payment authorisation, there's an app for that! Besides, Google Wallet or any other mobile wallet should support this usage scenario. 

PS: Just curious to know why your bank's calls to you reached your wife and not your smartphone directly when you were in Las Vegas. If it was because your smartphone is not enabled for international roaming or you were using a different SIM card while in the USA, then I doubt whether any of these mobile apps will work either. In most LBS apps we've developed, our customers have insisted that the source should be authenticated by mobile number. In all likelihood, requests from a phone with a different # will fail.