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I'm not so sure how many customers really believe that every penny they save for the bank comes back to them - I for one don't. According to WRBR-2011 report, it's in a country like USA where online banking is quite mature that customers find the branch to be the most important channel. So, I don't believe that cost or channel capability matter so much to customers while judging their banks' multichannel offerings. 

What does matter - and this is what banks need to keep in mind while allocating their multichannel dollars - is customers' perception that "the branch and internet (have) different strengths". According to the report, customers all over the world believe "The internet excels in information gathering, transacting, and looking up account status ... The branch is the preferred channel for solving problems, indicating the value of having a human touch in certain situations." 

Called NetSafe, my bank has been offering something like this on Visa/MC credit/debit cards for more than two years - not sure if it's from Muscato Group.  

https://netsafe.hdfcbank.com/ACSWeb/enrolljsp/HDFCValidate.jsp

@Paul S: 

Great point!

According to this recent FORTUNE magazine story titled "Problem banks list hits 888", FDIC has taken over and  merged 800+ banks with healthy ones since March 2008. They weren't all "too big to fail", were they? Why weren't they allowed to fail?

In actual practice, every failing bank seems to be getting rescued - it's just that some of them cause a major PR disaster for the government when they go down, whereas others are quietly folded into healthier banks over a single weekend through a well-oiled "secretive process that has all the makings of a heist flick", according to another FORTUNE article titled "How the FDIC takes over a failed bank that uses a nice comic strip to illustrate the process. 

PS: Not sure if hyperlinks to third-party content are allowed, but you should be able to find these two articles with a Google Search of their titles. 

Instead of hiring a couple of dedicated employees to do this job, they probably thought they could save some money, 'ignite creativity' and 'foster collaboration' by "crowdsourcing" the activity to their own huge workforce. Too bad, their employees didn't see it that way! 

Props to banks. By placing the findings of this survey in the context of a few recently released reports (World Retail Banking Report 2011 and Deutsche Bank Social Media Report), it appears that their channel strategy is working: 

1. Customers say online banking is one of the two most important channels for them (branch being the other). This survey finds customer satisfaction to be high on online banking.
2. Banks have a long way to go to catch up on mobile, but since their customers don't accord high importance to this channel, banks can take their time to set the right priorities for their mobile strategy. With time, they might find Mobile RDC to be the first mobile payments killer app!  
3. Customers say they're not too interested in connecting with their FIs over social media. Therefore, budget-starved banks can afford to hold on to their social media plans until customer preferences change. For now, as a representative customer, I'd be more than happy if banks replied to my letters / emails within a reasonable time - realtime tweets and Facebook updates are entirely optional!

However, there seems to be room for improvement in the branch channel. I hope banks do something about this instead of shutting down their branches en masse!

Given the deep pockets top US banks have, it's not too surprising that they've chosen to create a solution on their own instead of simply tying up with a PayPal or FiServ ZashPay who already offer such solutions. As I'd written in my personal blog at the time ZashPay was launched over a year ago, "...since it (FiServ ZashPay) has the potential to cannibalize the ... alternative fee-generating products already offered by banks, it remains to be seen if FiServ can gain widespread adoption among banks". 

"m" seems to be going the same way as "e":

In the early stages of Internet, many predicted the death of books. Ironically, Amazon showed the world that online shopping for books was one of the earliest "killer apps" for Internet. It has taken 15 years for Amazon to sell more e-books than paper books and for a BORDERS moment to happen. 

The same way, we've been hearing about the death of checks for a long time. Although Mobile NFC, mWallets and Mobile P2P will all happen eventually, I think Mobile RDC is probably going to be the first killer app for, ahem, "Mobile Payments"!

A single app for all credit/debit/prepaid/loyalty cards doesn't seem so adventurous after all. According to a story on NFCnews, ISIS is planning to launch exactly such an app that will store mobile coupons in addition. I just hope this plan of becoming the universal mWallet doesn't meet the same fate as ISIS' erstwhile goal of launching a brand new payments network to supplant Visa/MC/AmEx.  

It'd appear that EU has done very well so far in establishing a single economic area and currency despite countries so close by but languages so far apart; multiple languages in a single, relatively small country (e.g. Belgium), and so on. And all this without taking the easier way out of adopting English as the common business language. Agreed that there could now be challenges for achieving further progress going forward. Kudos for pointing out the role of language and culture as critical success factors. It's a refreshing change from the common approach of sweeping such differences under the carpet as "soft factors".

Hi Siddharth:

You make a very valid point. Indeed, 'Revenue/Billing Management' is an excellent area for revenue enhancement for banks. What's more, banks have implemented FPS and many other technologies in the last couple of years. While these programs were triggered by compliance considerations, the resulting solutions now provide ample scope for banks to launch new products and services to tap additional sources of revenues. New commercial models with technology vendors might prove to be tipping points for banks to forge ahead with such initiatives. We've already started hearing stray cases of vendors developing solutions almost for free and agreeing to link a bulk of their compensation to incremental revenues generated from the products/services launched over the solution. As such models reach mainstream, we'd hopefully see greater traction for revenue enhancement technologies.