Community

@SimonJ:

Thank you for taking your time out and providing a brilliant explanation for this apparent quandary around passwords for eBills. I can easily understand the risk of my eBill going to someone else because the Biller has got my email address wrong. However, IMHO database glitch is not the only cause of this. Anyway, after hearing all this, I'm led to wonder even more about whether email is a suitable medium for bills and statements except for the nomadic set.

@SimonJ:

Nice article. Wanted to check your views around passwords used in eBills. Would customer's preference for / against passwords be a valid candidate for inclusion into the preference center / table? Or, would that be dictated more by regulatory factors? As I've pointed out in the following Finextra post, I personally hate passwords. Since my eBillers don't offer me a choice to receive eBills without them - or to change the password to one of my choice - I'm left with no recourse but to insist on printed bills.

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=6106   

@BrettK: 

I share your suspicion. However, I won't blame banks totally for their stance for they face compliance challenges with KYC and social media. Of course, technologies - like Actiance Socialite about which I'd posted a blog on Finextra last year - are already available to overcome such challenges. But, when business case, ROI and other matters enter the picture, the scene does become quite hazy!

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=5241

Furthermore, take the case of a random non-customer who has nothing else to do or is engaged by a competitor. Suppose they start posting negative comments - which can even be sacrilegious lies - on a bank's FB Wall. Surely a bank cannot treat such comments as an occasion to conduct dialog? Depending upon the situation, the bank might not even be able to justify the efforts of rebutting each such comment. Shouldn't the bank have some recourse in such cases - if not to delete such comments, at least to block such people from posting on its Wall?

I hope this incident triggers off some kind of "Bill of Rights & Responsibilities" for Facebook participants - banks and their customers alike. 

My company has had good experience with RhoMobile, another cross-platform mobile apps development environment. We developed a location based task reminder which makes heavy use of smartphone features like GPS, phonebook and mapping. We could generate Android and iPhone native apps from a single code base developed over RhoMobile without changing even a single line of code. RhoMobile also claims support for WP7 although we didn't get a chance to try it out. The future of RhoMobile is somewhat unclear though - it got acquired by Motorola Mobility, which itself got acquired by Google later. 

Westpac hopefully recognizes that Facebook Wall is a feed and not an inbox. Since comments anyway tend to fade away from the FB Wall in a few hours, Westpac shouldn't find any need to delete negative comments and attract such a PR backlash. In a couple of blog posts, I've raised a few concerns about another bank's FB behavior.

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=6187

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=6213 

At the same time, I don't envy FB administrators and digital marketers of banks and other businesses their responsibility to safeguard their brand on a platform that is outside their control. Do they have any recourse if and when impostors masquerading as bank customers keep bombarding their FB Walls with false comments? One likely solution: "Premium FB Company Pages", where a company pays for a fan page in return for greater control over what happens there (e.g. "ban" such impostors from posting on the Wall).

Is Australia singled out by the media or does this kind of thing happen only there? At the risk of exaggeration, will we soon see a news headline "All ATMs and POS systems in Australia work fine today"?

@Dirk K: 

Congrats!

Many such announcements end with "Android version coming soon". Should we make much out of the conspicuous absence of such a concluding line in yours?

Basic Demand-Supply curves can already provide the underpinnings of a platform that can simulate the effect of price of Product A on the performance of Product A. The real challenge is to come up with a platform that can simulate the effect of price of Product A on the entire portfolio of products A, B, C, etc. belonging to different SBUs of the bank. Even assuming that someone cracks the Holy Grail of relationship based pricing, they'd still have to surmount the walls of the silos in which banks are organized today and will likely be well into the future. What might really work is a rewards and recognition system that works at the level of the entire FI, not at SBU-level - that surely sounds like a pipedream already.

@Finextra Member:

Interesting point!

In the past, due to shortage of computing power or its exorbitant costs, scientists have reached "big conclusions" on the basis of small sample sizes that were often statistically insignificant. With growing computing power and falling costs, we've perhaps reached a stage now when we can actually analyze *all the data* and come to (a) "big conclusions" that are truly applicable for the entire population and / or (b) "micro conclusions" that are applicable for an audience of one or a handful of people. This might explain all the buzz around "big data" these days.