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For Google, such a step might be attractive since they've seen drastic reduction in growth projections of search business from a peak of 40% a year to 15-17% now. More details are available at

http://sketharaman.com/blog/2011/01/09/the-disintermediation-of-search/

But, I'm not sure why the customer should bother. Showing me search results is one thing, taking care of my money is quite another thing. Warts and all, banks are doing an okay job of the latter, so I wonder why customers should switch their accounts to "Google Bank". 

@Antti Larvala: Large MNC banks (ex: Citi) have been offering realtime cross-border retail payment transfers for several years now within their own branches across the world. So, I don't know if Google can do anything better there. However, if Google does the same thing between one of their branches and another branch of another bank, that would be great, but then I'm getting ahead of myself! 

Kudos to Union Bank. While many banks talk about doing everything to improve customer experience, very few actually go beyond paying lip service to it. By investing in such technology, Union Bank has proved that it puts its money where it mouth is, when it comes to demonstrating its commitment to improve customer experience.

On the one hand, PayPal and other alternative payment providers are making it easier to even put through cross-border payments by using only the email address or mobile phone numbers of a recipient. On the other hand, if the proposed EC measures go through, banks would be forced to ask payers to enter at least twice as many keystrokes to initiate a domestic payment via SEPA.

While Mr. Barnier might believe that "...making payments cross-border will become as easy as making them at home", I somehow can't escape feeling that "making payments at home will become as hard as making them abroad".

I hope this doesn't result in an overall drop in e-payments adoption and a return to cheques! Why am I suddenly reminded of a recent Finextra article that said that UK's Payments Council is planning to introduce a paper-based alternative to cheques? 

You've rightly pointed out that, when the average consumer if unhappy with a bank, they don't close down accounts but open a new account at another bank and use their old account(s) less and less. I can vouch for such a behavior from my own personal experience. In the earlier world of hefty fees for automatic overdrafts, this was neither a great strategy for customer retention nor for revenues.

But, in the post Regulation E world where banks are banned from levying overdraft protection fees except for consumers who opt-in for it, I am not so sure how eager banks really are to hold on to existing customers for checking accounts, and, therefore, whether they're likely to change much - Metro notwithstanding. 

I'm not sure if it's widely known that PayPal not only plays the role of a payment service provider but also that of an acquirer of card transactions. In its former role, the payer and payee must both have PayPal accounts, no bank is involved in the payment transaction, so PayPal is surely in a competing position with banks. However, I for one learned only recently that it's not necessary for the payer to have a PayPal account in order to make payments using PayPal to the PayPal account of the payee. In this role, payers pay with their credit cards, the payer's credit card issuing bank is very much in the loop, and it would appear as though PayPal is not in a competing position with banks.  

If TfL is trying to save the fees paid to the Oyster operator for topping up the card, how does it plan to save on the interchange fees it would have to pay to the card issuing bank when it begins accepting network-branded credit and debit cards?

@Finextra verdict:

If I were to guess, the paper alternative to cheque might be something like the German Ueberweisungsauftrag that used to be very popular when I was in Germany 7-10 years ago. In a paper version of SCT or SEPA Credit Transfer, the payer enters the payee name, bank account details, amount, and date into a preprinted paper form. After signing it in "wet ink", the payer hands over the form to their bank (unlike a cheque that is handed over by the payer to the payee). The payer bank converts the payment instruction electronically before forwarding it to the scheme (equivalent of BACS).

Although the payment originated in paper, it gets counted by the scheme as an electronic payment. 

This might just be the UK Payments Council's way of having its cake and eating it too!

After being exposed to strategic payment hub programs at several Tier-1 banks in many regions of the world, I've begun to believe that a single payment hub for all types of payments is a pipedream that is not achievable. I've come across many a program of that nature commence with the grand vision of achieving consolidation across the bank, only to decompose into individual "hubs" for different products and / or geographies. For example, one payment hub for Faster Payments, another for TARGET2, yet another for CHAPS; or one payment hub for North America, another for Western Europe, yet another for Emerging Markets, and so on.  

Technology issues apart, a bank-wide consolidation of all payment types is often rendered infeasible due to business silos, grossly variable service levels and a wide range of fee structures that span the different payment types. 

Given the hefty fee incomes that banks earn from their payments business, saving in operational costs by migrating to a single payment hub is arguably not a high priority for the C-Suite, whose blessings are nevertheless required for any bank-wide initiative like this to succeed. 

With Facebook Credits already around, Facebook Credit Card might not be far away!

@Michael: 

Agreed. But, going by the following statement in the Forrester report, this segment seems to be in the majority :"Worse still, 37% of account holders who receive a paper statement today say they will never abandon paper in favor of online statements."

Your suggestion for "Send in post please" is an excellent feature for boosting adoption of e-statements. However, I haven't come across a single bank actually offering it and don't really trust a single one of them to invest in establishing processes to handle interruptions to their STP flows such exceptions would probably cause.

IMHO, herein lies the crux of the overall problem: Technology supports a feature, individual customers don't necessarily implement it for whatever reason, customer adoption is stunted. Given that customers have no way of influencing how a given customer will implement a given technology, they form wrong - and often negative - opinions about the technology as a whole. When that happens, it's not a great position for technology providers to be in.