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@BrettK:

Agreed that it makes no sense to drink from the said branch kool-aid fountain.

Payday loan providers largely operate through branches and are still thriving. PROSPER, Zopa and other P2P lending services don't have branches and are growing rapidly. Both owe their positions to their differentiating business model of serving customers with high credit risks who won't qualify for loans from mainstream banks - not to their respective channel strategy.  

For that matter, if a bank offers a credit card only at its branches to people with subprime FICO scores, I'm sure enough people will flock to the branches. This won't prove that branches are better than other channels. 

I'd covered this subject last year in my personal blog post How Many More PFMs Do We Need? Only individual companies jockeying for market leadership will fix the problem with PFM. 

To me, Mint has fixed this problem and has been rewarded with market leadership for its efforts. While I personally refused to share my Internet Banking credentials while registering for Mint, I can't deny that (a) over 5M users of Mint have done so (b) the thousands of involved American banks haven't protested about infringement of their standard terms and conditions nor have they implemented 2FA en masse which will render this method infeasible. When it's in such a position, I'm not sure why Mint would want to promote an industry standard which will result in diluting its competitive advantage, besides anyway going the same way as OFX.

Talking about elusive industry standards, in his sayanora blog post, the CEO of WeSabe admitted that one of his chief mistakes was to delay embracing a proprietary platform like Yodlee in the quest for a vendor-independent industry standard.

Just a few hours after Faster Payments went live in May 2008, a payment I initiated from my HSBC account reached my colleague's Barclays account in literally a few minutes. So did his return payment back to me. FSA's comments are surely disorienting against that personal experience. Has the overall industry gone retrograde since then to invite them? Or, if they only pertain to a few select banks, some 'naming-and-shaming' might help accelerate the change in the status quo.

Great example. Not sure, though, how many banks in this day and age are able to spot such opportunities for cross/upselling when most of them seem to discourage telephone requests for such transactions and push customers instead to Internet banking or paper forms dropped in drop boxes.

While developing an LBS mobile app for the US market that automatically logs the smartphone user's location several times a day - to help respond to residency tax audits several years down the line - we came across consumer behavior traits that parallel those mentioned in Tim T's comments above. In fact, some of our users didn't even want their location to be recorded - let alone they being tracked - at pre-defined times like, say, when they were on vacation. All of them insisted upon password protection of the continuously updating location-versus-time log file. Telling them that their data was anyway protected by their phone's lockscreen password didn't work!

Not sure how changing the laws would help. I remember the consumer furore caused last year when some Californian retailers insisted upon the cardholder's zip code before accepting a card payment. 

Ah, that's a different question and one that I'd asked, and answered, a couple of years ago in my person blog post Banks Can’t Look Down On Remitters (Finextra policy forbids me from giving a hyperlink to this post but it comes up first on the search results when you Google search by its title).

Let alone remittances from bank accounts to nonbank accounts belonging to the emerging networks of the nature mentioned by you, banks don't seem to be interested even in the conventional bank account to bank account money transfer business. Reason?

According to the Western Union executive I'd quoted in my post, 'many banks still view remitters in developed countries as impoverished, nearly illiterate, and hence not worthy of selling checking accounts, credit cards, mortgages and other banking products. According to one former banker and remittance specialist quoted in this article, “not all banks will want the footflow into their branches on the sending side. They don’t want these guys coming into their branches and cluttering up their nice clean offices”.  Apparently, banks fear that putting remittance service stickers on their windows would dilute their brands.'

No, I didn't mean the electrical appliance. I meant electricity, which is the correct analogy for money. As far as I know, electricity produced in USA cannot be transmitted to UK due to difference in specs. Period. At least, banks are transferring money produced in USA (USD) to money that is usable in UK (GBP). 

Even where electricity can be transmitted from Place A to Place B, it obviously can't be handed over to the consumer's hands (God forbid!). The electricity company is justified in delivering it to a plug point and in expecting the consumer to have access to a plug point. Same way, why can't a bank expect the beneficiary to have a bank account?

Consumers might be justified in wanting everything their way but regulations do impose certain limits on what banks can and can't do. I've given a few concrete examples of the role of regulation on customer experience in this and a couple of other Finextra posts / comments. And, then, there's the uncomfortable question of whether the consumer is willing to pay for all this or expects the regulator to clamp down on banking fees.

How true! In times like these, innovative business models that unearth latent sources of value have the best chance of upending the status quo and ushering in new technologies. In a recent example, a state-of-the-art billing / statementing solutions provider was able to take its appeal to the next level by upgrading a plethora of over 100 legacy systems to a spanking new, unified system for no more than the customer's outflow on its existing landscape.

However, vendors need to be very cautious about developing such business models for it doesn't take much for capex-starved customers to suddenly claim to become opex-challenged as well.

As I'd written in my personal blog last week, mobile apps offer MNOs a great opportunity to increase cross-selling and upselling of their VAS, boosting their ARPUs in the process. Not sure whether the same will hold good in BFSI where products and services are more complex. But, the mobile app initiatives by Allianz, Aviva and RBS are steps in the right direction. Even if they don't result in deals, they're a good source of leads. 

... Regular cops nab the criminal group. Dexia Bank avoids succumbing to blackmail. Cybersecurity cops then enter Dexia Bank. They nab everyone responsible there for the bank's callous attitude. Regulator fines Dexia Bank 100X of the ransom amount. All banks learn a lesson. 

Hope the movie has a happy ending like this.