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Good observation! I'm seeing more and more cases of banks, telcos and government agencies rejecting the electronic medium. 

While claiming a tax refund from the UK HMRC, I found out that, while I could file the return via Internet, they refused any communication by email. Only snail-mail was allowed.

During my several year-long ordeal to collect my social security refund from the federal authority in Germany, they accept signed letters sent by fax, but their letters are always sent by snail mail, which takes 10-14 days to reach me in India. Citing EU data protection laws, they refuse to talk about any personally identifiable information on the phone and refuse email altogether.

I've begun wondering if the near-obsolete fax machine is making a quiet comeback!

Voice based authentication has been tried in the past - I am aware of at least one provider in the US. At the time, several years ago, the technology wasn't fully mature and there were instances of genuine account holders with a sore throat finding their access blocked! If the technology has matured since then, voice verification is surely an option that strikes a good balance between security and convenience.  

I don't know about Japan but there has been no recent change in regulation in India as regards inbound cross-border remittance licensing. According to PayPal's own communication to its customers in India - I being one of them - "the RBI has told us that PayPal needs specific approvals to allow personal remittances to India, which we currently do not have. Until we get these approvals, personal payments into India will remain suspended." It seems like PayPal did business without a license all these years. It's just that its non-compliance with pre-existing regulation got exposed recently. 

While bill payment hyperlinks are prominently displayed on many retail banking NetBanking websites, an attractive bill pay widget will definitely draw more eyeballs. But, after customers are attracted to bill pay, making the actual payment process more frictionless is key to conversion and greater adoption of this functionality. In the non electronic bill payment world, the customer simply presents the bill to the person at the counter, hands over cash or card, and the transaction is done. Whereas, in electronic bill payment, the need to pre-register the bill causes significant friction, especially when the lead time from pre-registration to actual posting of the bill is often a few weeks, by which time the deadline for that bill has elapsed and the customer goes back to manual bill pay. If only the widget could be enhanced so that it supports one-off and on-demand bill payment, adoption of electronic bill pay would be significantly bolstered.

I just wish banks would seamlessly integrate the electronic funds transfer functionality on their websites to the Payments Council's online tool. That way, if I attempt a (say) FPS payment to a certain sort code of the intended recipient on my bank's website, and if that sort code is not enabled to receive FPS payments, I would get an error message right there - instead of me having to go to the Payments Council website separately to check this.

Something didn't make sense in Citi's original article hailing the pilot to be a great success. I simply couldn't figure out how participating customers agreed to buy the NFC-enabled Nokia handset with their own money when the article itself said that most of them already had more sophisticated models that were less clunky. Kudos to Gartner for pointing out that there was fewer than one NFC transaction per merchant per day. With such a low number, it's a stretch to call this pilot successful.   

When customers send payments messages containing errors, payments shops tend to levy repair charges for any E&I work they carry out before the can complete execution of the payments. This could amount to a sizable revenue stream for payments shops. The basic technology for superior solutions already exists, their successful implementation has been proven to cut down E&I costs. But, the problem is, only some payments shops might look at that outcome in a favorable light - they could use their new found ability to offer lower repair charges as a competitive advantage to grow market shares; whereas others might fear a drastic reduction of revenues in a new world of greater transparency where prices are expected to be more closely linked to costs. 

How well the go to market strategies of Pega Systems, Viveo and other E&I players balance the apparently contrasting effects of a successful E&I implementation on the payments business would ultimately determine whether E&I enters boardroom agendas or stays on the sidelines. 

In over 25-30 trips on Virgin Trains between London, Crewe, Manchester and elsewhere in UK, I have surely encountered a vast range of ticket prices depending upon the time of the day and the day of the week. But, I never thought I was being ripped off because the widely-varying prices were known to everyone in advance.

Unlike most airlines, Virgin Atlantic conducts onboard customer satisfaction surveys. Not just that, when I'd complained about something or the other not working on the aircraft, someone from the CEO's office of Virgin Atlantic actually bothered to reach out to me. In another instance, when I contacted Virgin Atlantic in connection with a ticket that had been declared void at the time of check-in, I got a prompt response and a resolution to the problem that was found to be caused by the online travel agency through which I'd booked the ticket.

Based on my personal experience, therefore, I have no hesitation in believing Virgin's claims of not ripping off its customers, and wish its banking initiative all success.

Your point about the opportunity available to banks to bolster customer advocacy and retention by building products that meet unstated customer requirements is very valid. Another low hanging fruit is to combine security and convenience of everyday banking tasks using frictionless online interaction solutions. As I'd pointed out in a recent blog post, HSBC has strongly differentiated itself with its recent declaration that  security does not have to come at the cost of convenience, which was accompanied by a new security feature. 

Whether they realize it or not, in today's connected world of Web 2.0 and social media, a bank's reputation is no longer shaped solely by its CorpComm or MarComm. Finance portals, job sites, review blogs, freelancer exchanges, and tweets from current, former and potential employees - are all awash with opinions about a bank's performance, products and services. A quick check using HEATMAP360, socialmention or any other realtime online buzz monitoring tools reveals overwhelming negative sentiment toward banks - 58% in the case of Citi, 100% for Barclays and 62% for ICICI.  But, thanks to such tools, banks can now monitor all this buzz and take proactive action to manage their reputation.