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While buyer portals will be buyer-specific, bank portals will also be bank-specific (try selecting the same utility in the bill pay pages of Internet Banking portals of two different banks, and you'll get my drift). Even third-party e-invoicing portals will inevitably acquire multiple flavors for different billers / banks as they try to boost their adoption.  Unfortunately, like e-billing portals that have been around for over a decade for consumer bills without much standardization, I'm afraid generic e-invoicing is also a pipedream. 

Let's say I'm in the market for a shirt (or a mobile phone or a book). For 'shirt', I appreciate Google Search dedicating enough resources to serve me about 972 million results in 0.21 seconds.  Unfortunately, I don't have the resources to review so many results - a lot of which are spam anyway - to make up my mind. If only I could search for 'shirt' inside Facebook. Even the 2-3 results from my friends would suffice. When I actually tried that using Facebook Search, I got one result from a friend for 'shirt'. However, I got none for 'mobile phone' or 'book', for which Facebook results only showed brand pages related to these items. If only Facebook showed more results from friends in a convenient way, I'd head to Facebook Search first and get results that are virtually endorsements. This illustrates the power of 'Social Search'.

The UK Payments Council may have been well-intentioned while announcing its proposal to drop cheques well ahead of the deadline. However, in hindsight, had it waited for a couple of years for better alternatives to cheques to emerge - none exist today according to a recent Daily Mail article, a view with which I completely agree* - the man on the street would've had the chance to experience them first hand. At that stage, the present hue and cry over "why not cheques?" would've automatically dissipated to "why cheques?".

* for reasons expressed in detail at  

https://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=22761

This just in from McKinsey Quarterly: "How Europe’s retail banks handle channel strategy".

While I'm still unable to download and read the full report, just the following takeaways from the introduction shed a lot of light on the channel preferences of customers and contain solid guidance for how banks should respond regionwise.  

1. Consumers ... want both electronic and physical contact points.
2. ... customers increasingly use face-to-face channels for sales and advice, and remote ones (the Internet and ATMs) for most transactions.
3. Density of branches will fall considerably in overbanked areas of Southern Europe but remain stable or even rise in parts of Central and Northern Europe.

I just came across a Daily Mail article today. The title of this article says it all: "... Cheques will not be scrapped in 2018 because there are no better alternatives".

Talking about costs, quite frankly I don't see why the man / woman on the street should care if banks incur higher costs for processing cheques: All costs of banks - including fat bonuses to its executives - are going to be passed on to him / her in one form or the other anyway. Why single out only the cost of cheque processing? However, my personal experience with Phone Banking and Internet Banking with two Indian and two European banks in the last 24 hours permits me the luxury of sticking to the topic of cheque processing costs. 

I'm willing to pay a bank some X amount for every cheque I write provided the bank pays me some Y amount for every ePayment that I'm unable to put through their telephone or website for no fault of mine viz. field length is too short to support the true size of the data element (e.g. beneficiary name); maintenance shutdown; inaccurate information, etc. Assuming X and Y are close to the respective costs incurred by each party, I'm very sure that I'll earn enough money from just one month of the latter to fund a lifetime of the former! 

Yeah, right. That's probably what WebVan thought of conventional grocery stores, INGDirect USA thought of conventional banks having branches, and digital pundits thought of conventional cheques. The first one crashed and burned after $$M in VC funding; the second one is just another channel of a conventional bank; as ilustrated by banks' recent decision on the third in the UK, I'm confident that banks know to place consumer preference and customer experience - cheque trumps ePayments on both - ahead of anything else while deciding the right mix of products / instruments / channels.

Google Wallet and the like are mere wallets and not payment methods. They store information of products issued by, well, banks - no bank issued credit card, no use of Google Wallet for the consumer. The question of regulators entering the picture doesn't arise. Banks don't have to seek the permission of Apple / Google to access their own customers. They can always opt for SMS or mobile web applications instead of native apps as many of them have already done. In India, the regulator has already created a framework that excludes a solo mobile money play by PayPal. When the non-bank financial services providers start learning banking and feeling the compliance pressures that banks have been subjected to for ages, I for one strongly believe - based on my experience with PayPal and a couple of others - that their customer experience will fare far worse than banks'.

While giving due credit to nonbank players for their innovations, it's too far-fetched to believe that they can make a significant dent on banks in the foreseeable future. If and when they do, banks can use their deep pockets to mitigate the impact by buying them out, as they've already done with Revolution Money and in the other cases I've pointed out. 

Core banking vendors who go that far would surely provide an unbeatable value proposition. But, given my personal experience with a few of them, I'm not sure how many of them would want to go that far. There are midway approaches that could use (say) maintenance cost arbitrage between legacy and modern systems. These alternatives are equally effective in bringing down customer objections while being far more palatable to vendor executives.

I agree with Colin H's views that much of what we're seeing from the new startups is really fringe activity that has very low chances of threatening traditional banks. Besides, traditional banks have deep pockets, made deeper by government bailouts that unfortunately don't rain down on the Blippys and WeSabes of the world. With their huge resources, they (i.e. traditional banks) have the luxury of waiting and watching and letting the startups do all the evangelizing and then cherry-picking the promising ones. Citi-eCount (prepaid card), AmEx-Revolution Money (alternative payment), and, most recently, CapitalOne-INGDirect (digital channel), are cases in point. The recent actions of Reserve Bank of India and Dodd-Frank-Durbin in the context of bringing PayPal under some level of regulation in India and the USA respectively prove that regulators might start overseeing non-bank financial services providers well before a catastrophe strikes thousands or millions of their customers. 

This is a great win for supporters of customer experience, especially that of the man on the street. When it comes to making a donation, there's nothing more convenient than writing a cheque, putting it into an envelope and mailing it.

This also highlights the critical success factors for bringing about changes in consumer behavior.

Rapid adoption of mobile RDC proves that consumers will change their behavior if they stand to gain something from the change. On the other hand, they'll resist change that results in worse customer experience just for the sake of going digital. Instead of cheque, let's see what the customer has to go through to make an ePayment: Navigate through layers of username/passwords; maybe carry an authentication device; enter long account numbers and sort codes; adapt the real name of the beneficiary and narration of transaction to the restricted field lengths of the banks' application; hope that the Internet connection and the Internet Banking application don't fail during the transaction; and, last but not the least, suffer the risk of sending the payment into a state of suspended animation in the ether with even a slight mismatch in the data.

There's a lot that banks and technology vendors need to do to improve customer experience of the digital channel before they can hope to change the behavior of the man on the street. Hopefully, this episode serves as a siren call.