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In 1985, there were no Internet or mobile banking, so a customer probably had no choice but to visit a branch even to find out their account balances, which explains 25 branch visits / year. My comment about the primacy of branch pertained only to sale/purchase of financial products. Given that an average customer is unlikely to buy more than 2 or 3 financial products per year per bank, the 2.3 branch visits / year of the today are probably used exactly for that purpose, which sort of proves my point. Like I mentioned, only 8% of consumer goods are bought online even today, 15 years after eCommerce started. Since figures don't lie, this says something about the preference of 92% of people - hardly a dwindling demographic - to engage in face-to-face interactions while buying something or starting a relationship. I've nothing against banks leveraging mobile and social media as appropriate. But, if they forget that bulk of their sales happen, and will continue to happen for the forseeable future, in their branches, they do so at their own peril.

eCommerce has been around for over 15 years and supports exemplary usability compared to other industries. Despite that, only 8% of shopping happens online in the USA, according to recent figures for 2010. Eventually everything changes, the same is bound to happen in financial services and we're already seeing a major shift to Internet and mobile banking for account balances, mini statements and the like. However, given that financial products are more complex than books and DVDs and the fact that banking systems are still fraught with a lot of friction, I don't think Internet - let alone mobile - banking is anywhere close to supplanting the branch for sale of financial products. Personally, I'll be happy if banks let me research products online and buy them offline at a branch without forcing me to retrace my online steps offline, which is what happens today. 

Maybe I'm missing something, but most of these features and facilities are available with bank and third-party P2FM portals. The former will work for customers who have only one bank account whereas the latter is suitable for people with multiple bank accounts.

As to why it's so much more difficult to search through your bank transaction history (or a given website or even your PC's local hard disk), I've obsessed over this very same issue for quite long and have recently learned that it isn't bank-specific. Apparently, the problem is with search engines like Google that rank pages on a given website on the basis of backlinks to it from other websites. Google Custom Search and other site-specific search engines don't work too well when told to search for pages within a website. To quote from the classics page of TechCrunch, which uses Google CSE for site search, "TechCrunch has published thousands of blog posts ... But try discovering them. It’s nearly impossible."

Hopefully, we'll start seeing libel suits against Twitter soon!

TowerGroup recently pointed out that most mobile banking apps in the USA were build for iPhone and Android whereas most banking customers used Android and BlackBerry! Hopefully, banks in the UK have decided their choice of platform based on the installed base of different mobile operating systems among their customer base rather than in the general market.   

@Steve B: 

"...on-line shoppers are voting with their feet and migrating to other on-line payments that are perceived to be more secure".

In the USA, which is where FFIEC is applicable, I'm a bit curious to know more about such alternatives, their market shares and the basis of the "fear of it discouraging shopping on sites that use it".

Our experience echoes your views in a new approach taken not only by large, but even midsized, technology partners. Under this approach, tech companies build the new technology at no upfront cost and recover their investments by charging ongoing transaction fees to their customers. By doing so, the vendors take on most of the risks and effectively let customers enjoy cost reduction “on a tap”.

On the face of it, this approach might seem akin to the subscription model offered by SaaS and cloud-computing vendors. But, that’s not so: With SaaS, the vendor owns the application cloud and provisions it for use by multiple customers without too much customer-specific functionality for any given customer.  Whereas, in the new approach, the vendor builds a new, highly-customized application for each customer that is not only owned by the customer but is also difficult to extend to another customer for contractual, if not functional, reasons.

More than five years after the release of the first set of FFIEC guidelines - which did mandate strong two-factor authentication - there are literally thousands of non-complying banks in the USA, as can be witnessed by the long list of banks that can be linked to Mint because they don't support 2FA. By keeping silent about strong authentication now, FFIEC seems to have decided not to bother coming up with guidelines that are observed more in the breach. 

CAPITALIZATION TESTING, 1-2-3... Seems to work fine for me.

Having gotten that out of the way, let me note that Singapore is conspicuous by its absence in this list of APAC countries with cutting edge use of retail payments technology. Over 10 years ago, well before NFC and contactless became buzzwords, Singapore set up a road toll collection system based on RFID contactless prepaid cards. Called ERP - no relation to the better known Enterprise Resource Planning software - it permitted motorists to drive past toll arches at normal speeds and have the dynamically-computed toll charge automatically debited to the prepaid ERP card affixed to the windscreens of their automobiles.

Apart from a similar system planned for commercial vehicles (LKW) in Germany - which, if memory serves right, was abandoned in the mid 2000s - Singapore's ERP is probably still unique.

@Andre M: Vendor tendency to be "eierlegende Wollmilchsau" probably stems from the customer tendency of "Waehrend des Essens, kommt das Appetit", if I remember the German saying correctly i.e. The appetite builds during the meal. The vendor starts with a finite product or service, the customer asks for extensions and customizations, the vendor builds them and then finds that they're quite relevant for other customers in other industries. This leads them to believe that "a payment is a payment is a payment". While their belief is largely valid at the technology level, it tends to make the customer question whether the vendor understands their business at all, as you've rightly pointed out. Although it's imperative for PSPs to deliver out of a single technology platform so that they can achieve scale, it's equally important for them to create different go to market messages for different industries in order to gain mass adoption.