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I'm a heavy user of online stock trading, e-commerce and Internet Banking. However, when it comes to statements, I've a very strong preference for paper - to the extent that I recently threatened a bank with canceling a credit card issued by them if they continued to avoid sending paper statements with the excuse that they were sending e-statements.

Resistance to change from my side is admittedly one reason, but my preference for paper statements is driven by many other factors that are beyond my control:  

1. I recently went through an account verification process by PayPal for my business account. PayPal insists only on paper statements as proof of address - it even says that it won't accept scanned versions of online statements. If a web-based company like PayPal insists on paper, you can imagine the situation with brick-and-mortar ones - Kurt has a very valid point. And, almost all of them ask for proof documents not older than 3 months, so an approach of issuing a paper statement for one month, followed by 11 e-statements for the remaining months of the year, won't work. 
2. Every time I receive an e-statement, I've to remember and supply some kind of account credentials - ex: last four digits of the account #, date of birth in a specified format, etc. - to open it.  There's simply no comparison with the convenience of tearing the envelope open and reading the paper statement.  
3. With identity theft on the rise, banks and others keep advising us to check our statements carefully and spot any false transactions. Doing this is very easy with a highlighter and a paper statement. How do I do this with an e-statement that typically comes in the form of a non-editable PDF file?

David:

Kudos for providing exposure to friction, which, in my opinion, is a serious hurdle for success in any business. In our work around our EMAIL360 widget and other frictionless online solutions, we see tremendous scope for improvement in reducing transaction friction not only in financial services but also in IT, high tech and other sectors - online payment and electronic bill payment are just a couple of cases in point. 

Unfortunately, spotting revenue losses due to friction is very difficult. In your example, Flippin' Pizza probably doesn't even know that they lost your pizza order. The problem is compounded by facetious responses like "if somebody really wants to buy, they'll take the trouble (to overcome friction)" that demonstrate absolute lack of understanding of the threat to their business from frictionless competitors.

I think we can see concrete improvement only when providers of frictionless solutions come up with innovative pricing models in which they offer their solutions at no cost and are willing to link their fees to incremental conversion brought about by their solutions.       

I'm reminded of my many shopping trips to SATURN in Germany in the early 2000s. I was always perplexed by this electronic retailer's policy of refusing credit cards. Then one day, while standing in the long checkout queue made longer by people patiently forking out cash to hand over to the cashier, I noticed a sign for a SATURN-Visa co-branded credit card. I thought things had changed until I reached the checkout counter, only to be told by the attendant that the co-branded card was only a marketing tool, and that SATURN's no-credit card policy still applied. In other words, SATURN wouldn't accept even a SATURN credit card!

From there to credit card becoming the most popular payments method ten years later - albeit for the online channel - reminds me of a favorite Bill Gates quote about how we overestimate the amount of change possible in two years but underestimate the amount of change possible in ten years!

Based on personal experience and anecdotal evidence, I agree fully with Forrester's view that, when it comes to banks, customers are more likely to provide direct feedback via traditional channels like emails and branch visits. Slow as banks may be in adopting technology, it's clearly a case of "better late than never" when it comes to adopting data mining and other technologies to gather insights from traditional sources. Hope banks on the verge of doing so don't lose steam because they're too busy counting the number of Twitter followers and Facebook friends they've gathered - although important in themselves, they're not in the same league as direct channels of interactions.

Our HEATMAP360 application provides realtime sentiments extracted from tweets and can be used to safeguard reputation although it doesn't do any event detection or prediction and is of not much use toward market surveillance and online retail banking and brokerage.

IMHO, it's not as though banks don't want to embrace innovation, it's just that they take so much time that it's almost obsolete by that time, raising questions whether they should be adopting it at all now that it's almost obsolete. Their snail's pace at adopting innovation is understandable because innovation causes change, which somewhat goes against the need for constancy and trust that's part of the  overall image they need to maintain with their customers.  

At the same time, it would be wrong to conclude that they never change: For every leading bank still on the Central Line, there's one you'd need to take the Jubilee Line or DLR to visit in recent years!

A couple of years ago, I was very impressed with Mint's value proposition and decided to register myself for it. I stopped right in my tracks when I realized that I had to hand over the logon credentials to all my Internet Banking accounts if I were to get any useful advice from Mint. By sharing my credentials, my thinking went at the time, not only would I be ignoring my banks' constant advice to never share passwords and other confidential information with anyone, but also be putting a lot of faith on a startup to safeguard all that data from hackers. Rudder's data loss example proves that it's really asking a startup for too much in an area where even leading banks and payments processors can't boast of a stellar track record.

First Kublax, then WeSabe, and now, Rudder - their failures don't bode too well for the prospects of the scores of other PFMs out there.

Wonder if Google suddenly realized that PayPal has added more and more functionality to its platform without making much noise - like I did when when I was recently trying to enable my company GTM360's website to accept credit card payments - and decided on a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach. 

From my past knowledge of PayPal, for a merchant to accept PayPal always meant that the payer had to have a PayPal account, which obviously limits its adoption. Only during my recent exercise did I learn that this is not the case. When I heard this, I stopped my search for a suitable merchant account provider and opted for PayPal instead. While PayPal might be costlier and provide less than exemplary service, it was an easy choice to make. If my behavior is representative of the average consumer's, it surely makes it that much more difficult for PayPal's competitors to make much headway against it.    

If they became as simple as writing a cheque, e-payments will automatically see a lot more adoption by the man on the street - there's no need for any government subsidies.

When many EU governments - Social Security in Germany, HM Revenue in the UK, to name a few - insist on using snail-mail for any letter that contains Personally Identificable Information (PII), I don't see why I should be slapped a penalty if I don't want to accept bills and invoices electronically.  

SEPA for cross-border is fine. But, I hope regulators seriously rethink their plans to mandate SEPA for domestic payments. There's already talk of making UK's Faster Payments available on mobile phones in a simplified manner in which Immediate Mobile Payments can be made using just the mobile number of the beneficiary. In this day and age, isn't it a bit retrograde to ask consumers to move from the already tedious 10-12 digit account numbers and 6-8 digit sort codes to an even more cumbersome SEPA regime that asks them to enter 20+ character IBAN numbers and 8+ character BIC codes for domestic payments?