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I fully agree with Madelie. Like we do for high-tech companies with our proprietary STRADOF model, it's probably time for Financial Services Companies to also look beyond the product to find differentiators, of which there are plenty in what we call the "Total Ownership Experience".

With my current ongoing struggle with two Top 5 UK banks to remit money from UK to India, I can readily propose "Concierge Remittance" as one such differentiated offering.

An in-person consultative service by knowledgeable staff at the branch premise will help demystify BIC, IBAN, transfer currency, and other complications involved in a typical high-stake remittance transaction.

In a previous experience a few years ago, it was very off-putting for me to reach the branch of a Top 5 UK bank to do a remittance transaction  in person, only to be directed toward a telephone, and then having to speak out a 30-character IBAN number, beneficiary name, and other details loudly enough so that I could be heard over the din of the surrounding lunch hour Canary Wharf crowd. What was worse, the telephone transfer didn't come free-of-cost. Even if people had to pay double that fee, I'm sure many of them would prefer face-to-face service for such transactions.

Brett:

I've just given up trying to transfer funds from UK to India after several hours of running around between the Internet Banking portals and call centers of various banks. One Top 5 UK bank's Internet Banking website only displays account balances, but doesn't process any transactions, instead deflecting customers to the call center, which also bids you an abrupt goodbye when you ask to speak to a live operator. Another Top 5 UK bank's Internet Banking website insists on BIC and IBAN details of the beneficiary, whereas the beneficiary's bank in India - the same bank whose UK website is partially down - hasn't heard of the concept of BIC and issues an IBAN that has no connection with the beneficiary's account!

On a day like this, Brett, you'd have to excuse me if the only way I can visualize customer-centered banking is by placing the customer at the center, a rock on one side and a hard place on the other!  

Hope banks follow your advice seriously and develop a fundamentally different version of customer-centered banking that genuinely brings about customer satisfaction.

Serverside Group has tapped what seems to be a fledgling, yet growing, trend among sales, marketing and other "business" groups in financial institutions to implement technology solutions with little or no "IT" involvement. We see it in Web 2.0 for Commercial Cards and Trade Finance, to name a couple of laserlike offerings. Where IT seems to be skittish with loss of central control that would be caused by implementation of such point solutions, business is able to spot excellent price-performance and has the budget to go forward with such initiatives. If this trend holds up, we might see technology companies making big changes in the way they market IT solutions to financial institutions. 

My ringside seat at the said Top 5 UK bank included SEPA and TARGET2, not just FPS. Just as FPS had a deadline of 27 May 2008, there was a go-live deadline for introduction of SEPA, which was 24 Jan 2008 for the first product SEPA Credit Transfer.

It's somewhat difficult to compare FPS and SEPA to draw any meaningful conclusion w.r.t role of regulation since the scope of SEPA was somewhat more ambitious. Whereas SEPA is expected to replace existing domestic schemes in all EURO countries - and the lack of deadline for SEPA can only refer to the lack of sunset date for these existing domestic schemes - FPS supplements other existing domestic schemes in the UK viz. BACS and CHAPS. Neither is there an end-date for BACS and CHAPS nor is one envisaged.

Yes would be my short answer to your provocative question! 

I happened to have the chance to get involved closely with UK Faster Payments when I was leading an FPS vendor consortium at a Top 5 UK bank. Need for regulatory compliance not only ensured adequate funding for the Faster Payments program itself, but also presented the opportunity to upgrade the entire payments landscape much of which was un-touched by modern technology since the late '80s.

Having observed many corporates' specific information needs from their banks around payments, remittance and reconciliations, I agree with George that transaction data is a goldmine waiting to be monetised.

At the same time, having witnessed typical responses from banks' transaction banking leadership to demands for such information from their corporate customers, I'm led to believe that there's a strong need to educate banks on how to use the incremental fee income from providing greater transparency with the perceived loss of float income that would accompany any reduction in opacity that such a measure would cause. 

As often is the case, the devil is in the details.

With their realtime, bite-sized, anywhere-access features, I personally find SMS alerts to be most effective in keeping a track of transactions in my bank accounts. To avoid drowning under too many SMS messages, I find the ability to set a threshold useful, so that only transactions exceeding that figure will trigger an alert.

John: You might want to watch out for "dormant charges", which some banks have started charging cardholders, especially of prepaid cards, for prolonged NON-usage of their cards!

One more barrier to adoption of credit card usage, especially in emerging countries, is the notion that it leads to overspending. While many people - including me! - will agree with this notion based on their personal experience, it's also a fact that, thanks to services like Offermatic, people can actually save money by using credit cards. Boosting credit card usage probably needs a two-pronged approach from banks and card networks in which they not only provide incentives but also buttress any apprehensions about overspending.

DBS Singapore, ANZ, Barclays, again ANZ - these are just the well-publicized cases of ATM / POS outages in the last few months. While fault-tolerant technologies already exist and can possibly prevent such outages, it appears that banks are finding it hard to justify their 1.5-2X costs in relation to more traditional technologies. The situation is rife for technology providers to innovate and create models that can be used to calculate and demonstrate to banks the $ value of the cost of such outages in terms of lost revenue, service costs and reputation loss.