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Brett - I wish you all the best with the primary strategy.- The number of established businesses that will hit the wall due to this black swan event will be astronomical and leave a swath of individual misery and destruction. If you can keep the team together and act with kindness and compassion it will be long remembered.

Hi John, I have penned a counter point to your views on email in banks.

Whereas your views may be focused on the use of email internally - my views are focused on the use of email externally.

regards - Mike

Being in a business that already sends email bills to Gmail customers - I believe that this would be a great service, however having asked 10 different Googlers about this, it would seem that it is buried deep in the back corridors and not yet close to being a public offering, a 'concept' is a better description.

Manilla, Zumbox and Doxo all found that working with billers to get data in a uniform format is problematic - as is trying to find a business model to make this work. Potentially having alternative motives for gathering the data (i.e. to better target ads to the customers) could be a better idea than charging the billers for the pleasure.

Roll on the Pony Express...

Whatever your personal preference about the form and format of customer communications, I take issue with the name of the campaign bankrolled by the paper and print industry and roping charities to claim legitimacy.

"Keep me posted" is a biased starting point for what is purported to be a customer centric, pro-choice campaign. 

I fully support giving customers a choice - but then campaign for that noble goal - not for a singular alternative that harks back to the dark ages.

Alex's point on legasy systems is a good one - it's incredibly hard to implement the change that is required to ditch 50 year old systems and start again.

But the risk is that you will become easy pickings to new entrants that don't have the same issues. 

Botin's quote "even young people like to go to a branch" seems to be the real talking point.

No-one 'likes' to go to a branch - but in some circumstances they are forced to by the bank's own process and interpretation of the regulations for KYC and risk-based events.

For Brett's vision of Bank2.0 to be truly realised, these last ditch visits to comsumate a transaction would need to be eradicated by smart tech.

But don't knock Botin's commitment to driving digital processes through a 150 year old institution. 

I can see where you are headed with this idea - but you have not considered the opportunity to send the eStatement as a encrypted attachment to an email, using the email body as valuable real estate for cross selling and marketing.

I get my Barclaycard statement this way and signed up for contactless payments off a marketing link on the email.

There will always be 3 'P's: Paper, Pull and Push

What most billers are missing today is the Push.

Paper has been the default for many years. Changing this default to Pull (come back to my website and fetch) is jut not a viable option.

However Striata customers are having great success in changing the default to Push - so that all new customers are email customers automatically and they have to specifically ask for paper if needed.

Over time this seems to be the most effective adoption strategy there is.

One of the problems with the Internet Banking strategy for saving your documents is that these are then lost if you move banks.

I recently moved countries and closed a few old bank accounts that I didn't need anymore. However before I closed the account I had to log in and download all the records to my computer for personal storage.

As soon as I closed the account access to my financial history was cut off.

It is much better to be in control of your own document storage. I'm eyeing the new services from Doxo and Manilla etc, but having used a similar solution in the past that ran out of VC cash and closed down - I'm not so sure I want to put all my financial info at the mercy of someone else's cash flow.

To fuel the fire about Print, Pull and Push, I've posted a blog about what adoption targets are realistic for 2012.

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=6344