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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.

When I last checked, Visa was a for-profit company, had to beat its competitors and needed to maximize ROI from its London Olympics sponsorship investment. No company can have a healthy bottomline without customers - proud and loyal or otherwise. Addison Lee who? 

In other news, "Three quarters of NFC-based mobile wallets will shut down by 2014". 

"The popularity of mobile wallets will help drive the move to NFC terminals". This must be news for mobile wallet providers who grumble that lack of NFC terminals is the biggest hurdle for their mainstream adoption.

While NFC might arguably improve the customer experience marginally, it absolutely won't provide "unprecedented opportunity for retailers to interact with consumers in real-time". Hasn't Berg Insight heard that realtime offers have been facilitated by non-NFC technologies for several years now? 

"...the shift to handsets is hitting advertising revenue."

This is consistent with my findings with the mobile version of a couple of blogs, including Finextra's, compared to their PC versions. More details can be found by Google searching for "Will Mobile Blogs Impoverish Bloggers?".

As I'd written about in these two Finextra blog posts, ICICI Bank has a Facebook app and many more banks provide customer service via social media. 

Pushing The Envelope On Technology - Part 1

Gain Social Media And Lose The Call Center Hold Music

The moment politicians get in on the act, tough times begin, as brick-and-mortar Wonga equivalents - called MFIs or Microfinance Institutions in India - learned the hard way. The problem with frictionless onboarding of the variety provided by Wonga is that people tend to forget that Wonga literally saved their bacon a few days after they've gotten onboarded. I doubt if politicians ever give any credit for it. When it comes time to repay their loans, they only think about the heavy interest costs and start appealing to consumer protection agencies and / or politicians to bail them out. Keeps happening in so many areas of financial services, hope Wonga is preparing itself to face it in its own space by budgeting for a high enough loan loss rate. 

@BrettK:

Thank you for clarifying. I fully agree re. problems of friction in various banking processes including application / onboarding. 

However, I think overall friction with nonbanks will only increase as they come under greater regulatory scrutiny. When it comes to deflecting blame for friction to regulations, I don't expect nonbanks to be any better than banks. In fact, since they're new to dealing with banking regulations, nonbanks could be worse than banks. I can cite PayPal's frequent freezes of merchant accounts as an example for this tendency. 

Talking specifically of application / onboarding, I hope the recent launch of Airtel Money (mobile wallet from the leading MNO in India and Africa) is not an indication of the extreme degree of friction we can expect to see from nonbanks going forward. Within one week of launch, there were three different product reconfigurations, sudden introduction of KYC, cooling period of 7 days before service activation, etc. Let me refer you to this FT article for more insights. 

Mobile money: Kenya good, India bad

Much as I personally hate friction in the onboarding process, my personal experience tells me that people have a short memory. Six months down the line, when high costs start eroding their prepaid card credit balances, I don't expect cardholders to forgive program managers for having given them such a wonderful onboarding experience a half year previously. Instead, I expect them to go and complain about their hidden fees and dodgy fineprint to some consumer protection agency - as they've already started doing.

@BrettK:

I can partially accept the simple-easy-fast value proposition only for PayPal. With PayPal coming under regulatory scrutiny, it remains to be seen how long it can retain this differentiator. While on this subject, let's not forget a less acknowledged fact that only the beneficiary of a PayPal payment needs a PayPal account. A sizable chunk of PayPal volumes comes from payors who don't even have a PayPal account and who make payments with their regular bank-issued credit / debit cards.

I fail to see how paying with a nonbank-issued GPR prepaid card is any simpler, easier and faster than paying with a bank-issued credit / debit card. According to the research I've come across, GPR is coming under regulator scrutiny only because its customers feel increasingly cheated by its hidden fees and fine print.