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While costs may be high, the few case studies I've come across demonstrate abundant benefits. Despite a strong business case, if SWIFT connectivity hasn't gained enough traction among corporates and SMBs, it seems to me that SWIFT and its resellers haven't done enough to provide a compelling reason to buy that resonates with their prospective customers' pain areas. Maybe they should take a leaf out of the marketing playbooks of ERP vendors who've managed to grow their revenues constantly by selling to corporates and SMBs over the years despite high license, consulting and maintenance costs against a backdrop of less than perfect track record of successful implementations. 

@Robert S:

Banks in Canada have reportedly informed customers that they will forfeit fraud protection from their banks if they disclose their Internet Banking credentials to PFM and P2FM services. Not a surprising move when viewed against the backdrop of fraud loss situation you've described. 

@Brett K:

Thanks, I now understand that "Mobile Engagement Banking" is the crux of your argument for the future of banking. The shift from traditional outbound to modern inbound marketing is already happening in many other industries, so I can easily forsee that it would happen in banking in the manner you've described. I agree that catering to that will call for different organization structure, messaging platform, analytics and UX as compared to today's. Even granting that banks are woefully unprepared for all this, they can always partner with third-party companies who are better in these things. Let's assume they fail to enter into such partnerships. Does it mean that Apple / Google and others who are better at fostering such engagement will disintermediate banks? No - not in the next five or even 10 years, and for the following reasons:

1. In principle, to me, banking per se holds primacy over mobile engagement banking. To put it plainly, banking is banking, engagement is only engagement. 
2. I've come across several cases of accounts being frozen unjustifiedly by PSPs like PayPal versus none by banks. Therefore, in actual practice, I'd feel safer putting my money in a bank - even an old fogey one that insists that I visit its branch for every transaction - than keep it in a PayPal account. This might change if regulators force PayPal and other PSPs to play by the same rules that are applicable to banks.
3. Notwithstanding the above, the whole point could be somewhat moot: As tech companies, Apple / Google / Facebook / eBay-PayPal enjoy a seat at the top of the valuation totem pole whereas banks have to stay content at the bottom half. It isn't reasonable to expect shareholders and Wall Street to permit the tech prima donnas to dilute their tech positioning and get into banking in any significant way, knowing that any such move would likely lead to their market caps taking a nosedive.  

In short, when it comes to banking solutions, to twist the popular saying, banks are not damned if they do, and not damned if they don't!

@Finextra M: 

Railroads got disintermediated by automobiles in the USA; the FORTUNE magazine recently reported that Google Search is getting disintermediated by vertical search engines, name brand etailers and group buying sites. History is replete with examples of incumbents getting blindsided by young upstarts in other infrastructure-heavy industries. At the time it happened, no one would have charged the incumbents of being the worst. To that extent, I don't believe that the present 4-corner card network model is permanently unassailable.

At the same time, history has shown that disintermediation can happen only when the newcomer renders the incumbent's offering irrelevant. Like someone said, the only way to beat Google is by making search less relevant and not with a better search engine.

If we look at mobile banking / payments, they continue to use banks and card networks. It's open to debate whether they're more or less convenient, secure, etc., than other forms of banking. But, one thing is undeniable: They're a form of banking and, by definition, they're not making banking less relevant. The only way banks and card networks can get sidelined is by something that makes banking and payments irrelevant. I don't know if that *something* will ever happen, but I'm sure that mobile banking / payments are far from that *something*.  

@Brett K:

If I were a bank, with due respect to Apple / Google, I'd hate to have to take their permission to offer mobile banking on their platforms. Perhaps, that's the real reason why I won't take mobile banking too seriously.

But banks might see this differently. After all, just because Apple / Google will have to write a check on, say, Wells Fargo, to meet their payroll and supplier payments, it doesn't mean that they've to take Wells' permission to provide technology solutions. Likewise, just because their core banking software runs on a datacenter that is powered by electricity from, say, EDF, it doesn't mean that banks need EDF's permission to provide banking solutions.   

The way I see it, a given customer has different needs. No single company can own the customer relationship for everything. Apple undoubtedly owns the iPhone apps and handset relationship with the customer, and no matter what banks do to enhance their internal mobile banking / payments capabilities, they'd still have to go via Apple to make their mobile apps available on an iPhone. But that doesn't mean that Apple owns the banking relationship - that's still within the preserve of the bank. Similarly, Google Wallet has made it clear that it isn't a payment service or a network but an m-wallet that stores credit / debit / prepaid cards. If there were no banks to issue these cards, Google Wallet will lose its basic purpose. So, while I see tremendous scope for partnership between banks, MNOs, PSPs and handset manufacturers, I strongly doubt if banks need to fear getting disintermediated as the provider of banking solutions.

Of course, I agree that banks might want to engage with iPhone / Android users increasingly via mobile advertising. However, I don't see how that's related to their mobile banking / payments offerings. They can achieve their engagement goals by allocating their advertising budget towards iAds / AdWords. I'm sure Apple / Google won't decline those dollars.

The context of mobile payments is indeed critical.

Right now, the usage scenarios for accepting mobile payments (a la SQUARE) seem lot more compelling than those for making them (a la Obopay, Google Wallet and other m-wallets). Besides not having much of a play with Square, banks might have recognized that a bulk of Square's appeal lies in its disruptive business model - no setup fees, no monthly fees, no need for merchant account - rather than mobile. Furthermore, banks need not fear that their traditional POS+gateway+acquirer+processor model will get supplanted by Square, whose 2.75% flat rate renders it too expensive for medium and high-volume merchants (cf. third party calculators from FeeFighters for cutoff levels above which the traditional model proves cheaper for merchants).

This might explain why banks face no clear and present danger from mobile payments and can afford to take a wait-and-watch approach.

Bling Nation's flat 0.5% interchange fees really seemed like a strong value proposition for American merchants who are protesting the 1-3% charged by the leading card networks. Like ISIS, Bling Nation offered merchants a viable alternative to Visa/MasterCard networks. By rebuffing both of them, US merchants do appear to want to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to their relationship with big card networks, as I'd posted recently on Finextra.

Looks like I was not the only one who found it strange to be taken to BlingNation's Facebook page to download the FanConnect app upon typing www.blingnation.com on the browser. Hope its ill-fated dalliance with social media doesn't put a dampener upon the social media plans of banks and financial services institutions. 

@Melvin H:

Whether the card is contactless or not, you'll be billed fraudulently only if someone other than you uses your card, not their card. In this case, contactless or not, you're protected by credit card fraud protection guarantee and the redressal process is well established. 

The only added risk I can see with NFC card is if your card gets accidentally charged as you were walking within a few inches past an NFC cardreader that was being rung up for someone else's purchase. This is likely to be a rare occurrence although, if it does happen, Visa will treat it as "first party fraud" and all those arguments you want to avoid will happen. 

The Big Brother metaphor applies only when employees are being monitored as they're going about exercising their normal rights. We're talking about a very different situation here: The employee is bound to keep company proprietary information confidential. When they declare (say) their involvement with a certain customer project on LinkedIn, they divulge such confidential information to the outside world. While they're doing so to embellish their profiles, it can't be overlooked that (a) they're not acting within their rights (b) they expose their employers to legal action from the aggrieved party (e.g. the customer who never wanted the project to become public knowledge). I don't believe that the company's mitigating action under this context should be termed as Big Brotherly.

For years, employees have been declaring such confidential information on their DOC/PDF resumes and emailing it to the company's competitors and elsewhere. In the past, companies lacked the technology to block such leakage. 

With the growing popularity of LinkedIn, the leakage is exposed. Thanks to Actiance, companies are now able to take deterrent action that they've always been entitled to.

The popularity of Mint, OfferMatic, BillGuard and other services that directly access the customer's bank account on the basis of a simple username and password suggests that two factor authentication solutions haven't been implemented by many US banks so many years after it was mandated by FFIEC. Against this backdrop, it's interesting to note that, while the court ruling holds a bank liable for compliance with FFIEC's mandate, it considers Password + Security Question as adequate implementation of 2FA although most security industry professionals won't think so.