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Although contrary to typical personal PFM advice to pay down mortgages ahead of any other debt, the results of the TransUnion Payment Hierarchy study make perfect sense in a real world: If they get booted out of their homes, they need their cars to get somewhere and their credit cards to survive the trip! 

Compelling reason to use is the primary driver of adoption of technology. Any technology that fails to provide this is unlikely to find significant mainstream adoption no matter how easy it is to use. Whipping out a plastic card at the checkout line and handing it over to the store attendant is not only standard operating procedure for consumers for years but it is also far easier and faster than opening a mobile app, selecting the right card, tapping the NFC POS terminal (where there's one), and so on. 

Bank accounts? FDIC? Is this the beginning of the end of viewing prepaid cards as a way of bringing financial services to the unbanked?

Most car drivers - or chauffeurs as they're called in some places - in the housing complex where I live in India migrated to smartphones well before the respective car owners did (many of whom still haven't). A couple of days ago, I saw a janitor at an Indian airport using a tablet. Maybe my experience is one-off but I've begun to wonder if we've got the smartphone / tablet demographics entirely wrong, so I won't be so sure about the plumber...

I remember reading a report that said online fraud loss was around US$ 6B. Even taking the Lexis-Nexis ratio of 2.33:1 at face value, total loss should translate to less than US$ 15B, which is far less than the claimed figure of US$ 102B. Something doesn't quite add up. Given that total US e-commerce volume is around US$ 500B, are we to believe that merchants suffer 20% in fraud losses? 

Agree with your suggestion #s 1, 2 and 4.

However, re. your suggestion #3, "Use a QR reader that offers you a preview of the URL that you have scanned so that you can see if it looks suspicious before you go there.", since it's customary to construct QR codes out of shortened URLs, I'm not sure how one can figure out if the URL looks suspicious or not. For example, a QR code for this blog post page (https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=6371) could be constructed out of its shortened version http://goo.gl/szlRT, which neither looks genuine nor suspicious.

Marketers of eBilling companies have done a great job of conveying the value proposition of their solutions to billers, which explains the high implementation rates of such solutions by billers (e.g. I don't know a single biller who doesn't offer eBills).

At the same time, marketers of biller companies haven't done a great job of conveying the value proposition of eBills to consumers (Sorry, 'saving trees' doesn't cut it - not just for me but for a majority of consumers according to a Forrester report), which explains their relatively low adoption rates by consumers (e.g. Even as I prefer to pay bills electronically, I insist on printed bills).

Marketers from both camps have chosen to ignore the reality of the world in which consumers live - a world in which they must often produce printed bills for KYC because the regulator insists upon it, will suffer stoppage of service because the email delivering their eBill bounced and the biller never bothered to resend it, need to encounter the friction of remembering yet another password or shared secret to open the eBill, and so on. Which explains both low adoption rate and high double dipping rate.

IMO, automatic enrolment into eBilling is a bad idea. Thankfully, not a single one of my billers has attempted it - in trying to achieve paper turnoff, I'm sure they don't want to risk consumers turning the service provider itself off! To me, the solution is straight-forward: Think of the consumers' everyday pain areas, package eBilling in such a way that it alleviates these pain areas, thereby providing a compelling reason for them to adopt it. While saving trees definitely has a place somewhere at the middle or top of Maslow's pyramid of hierarchical needs and wants, IMHO it doesn't qualify as a pain area for the average consumer.

Five years later and after one of the worst financial crisis - itself caused by black swan events - things might look different today but, when the RBS-ABN transaction happened, it had the overwhelming support of shareholders. Given that these are common folk and not vested interests, it's hard to accept that everyone thought it was a bad decision at the time. 

Maybe UK is ahead of others in PC-based-eCommerce and behind others in Mobile-based-mCommerce? Far as I recall, the BCG report focused on the former and this blog post focuses on the latter.  

While I agree with most areas for ROI, bank PFMs perhaps face one challenge far more acutely than Mint and other independent PFMs, and that is, the reluctance of customers to share their Internet access credentials to multiple financial products from multiple banks with one PFM-providing bank. (Personally, I might trust my multibank credentials with one bank compared to an independent startup, but I don't know if mine constitutes majority or minority behavior.) 

I recently noticed that HDFC Bank, India's second-largest private sector bank, recently discontinued its Internet Banking-integrated PFM offering called OneView and couldn't help wondering if its decision is a reflection of its failure to surmount this challenge.

Of course, I recognize that this challenge is only applicable in case of customers who bank with multiple banks for different products - not sure how big that segment is.