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@Bob Lyddon:

To summarize my understanding of what Michael Lewis wrote in his bestseller "Big Short", guys who created structured financial products are top of class from Ivy League colleges; guys who rated structured financial products are middle of class from Tier 2 colleges; GFC is not the first time that smart guys hoodwinked mediocre guys; it won't be the last time either.

Maybe his worldview is cynical, stereotyped and politically incorrect but it sounds quite plausible. It also explains why the same CRAs still have 94% market share - the smart guys wouldn't want the existing mediocre guys to be replaced.

@Bob Lyddon:

I'm from IT and I guess I'm guilty as charged. Your last paragraph is the money quote. To the list of culpabable parties, let me add CRAs. As I'd written at the time in my post entitled Credit Rating Agencies & The Financial Meltdown on my personal blog, consumers and banks were partaking in the festivities of easy loans and hefty fees whereas CRAs were sleeping at their post (if not worse). And, what's worse, for all the talk of disruption from fintechs and regtechs, the same CRAs still enjoy 94% market share today (Source: WSJ).

If this "zero sum" notion were true, the GDP of Earth should have remained constant - since there are no exports out of Earth. But we all know that combined GDP of all nations on Earth has been growing with time. I guess some of the commenters haven't heard about MBS, CDO, CDO2 and other structured financial products that banks have created out of thin air and from which they've made huge revenues and whopping margins, which is one reason why, despite all the competition and threat of disintermediation by every Tom Dick and Harry, finserv has remained the most profitable sector in FORTUNE 500 for a long time.

I've been hearing calls for relationship banking, personalized banking, etc. for at least 10 years. The jury's out on whether banks have delivered personalized banking or not. But one thing is absolutely clear: Banking is the most profitable sector in the world. And this trend has continued despite threats of disruption from fintechs for the past 5-7 years. 

OTOH, personalization in financial services is somewhat antithetical to its business model that's predicated on pooled risk. Besides, there's a thin dividing line between personalization and discrimination in a regulated industry like banking. As I'd highlighted my experience and anecdotal evidence in my blog post Banks Will Know Chipotle Is Going Bankrupt Before Chipotle, customers DON'T want too much personalization in financial services.

While banks do have a lot of data for providing personalized products / services, I'm not too sure if personalization beyond a certain extent is a smart thing.

RTP has been around for nearly 10 years in the form of Faster Payments but card is still the most popular cashless payment. Merchants can only dream. It's really the actions of banks and consumers that will decide whether Open Banking / RTP will overtake card payments. Banks by virtue of the control they exercise over the account authorization journey by Open Banking PISPs. Per Open Banking in the UK; a disaster in the making?, there's so much friction in the authorization journey that there isn't a single PISP that uses API access. Coming to customers, they get deferred payment, reward points and fraud protection when they pay with card. They don't get these benefits with OB / RTP. What's their compelling reason to switch to an OB / RTP payment (if and when one is available)?

@Rittick Banerjee:

You're preaching to the converted when you say branch expansion is not industry-wide because that's exactly what I've said myself in my original post:) That said, I can assure you that the phenomena is not restricted to the said bank. My OP has several examples of other banks that are also setting up / expanding their branch networks e.g. payment banks. Subsequent to my OP, Axis Bank (India) and JPMC (USA) are two more banks that have announced new branch openings as their GTM to enter new markets where their presence is nil / low.

Not sure why you think topline of banks is not "glamarous" (sic). The said bank is hailed for its consistenly-above market topline and bottomline performance. Besides, FINANCIALS is the largest sector by revenues and profits in the latest FORTUNE 500.

I firmly believe that convenience dictates channel preference far more than cultural differences, tech savviness, demographics, which banking activity / product is simple versus complex, and other factors. This is somewhat borne out by what Simple's CEO said in a recent interview: "...the reality is that most millennials, like most Americans, bank at the top four banks".

@Vijay D: 

TY for your kind words. I knew about JPMC but I missed BofA's announcement about the addition of 400 new branches. Thanks for the info.

Online payments in India have been subject to 2FA for several years now. In the early days, the failure rate used to be as high as 70%. Now, according to a recent article in ET SUNDAY, it has come down to around 35%. I'm not sure if this figure includes what I call "premature failures", which are abandonments caused by consumers who are too daunted by the huge number of moving parts to even attempt the payment in the first place.

Sigh I think I'll be proved wrong there. When digital payment-only new-age companies start accepting cash even in western markets after finding that 2/3rd of the world still uses cash regularly, cash probably won't go away in 185 years. 

https://www.compelo.com/uber-cash-payments-uk/

I find the headline totally accurate. According to the article, Monzo is the victim of somebody else's fault. Which is exactly what "fall guy" in the headline conveys. For a bank to make money off of current account, it has to make customers store more money, whether customer would need / want to or not. That's Banking 101. If Monzo hasn't managed to do that, it does face a huge challenge and that's what the article says.

I'm a little confused about the timelines. When you say "There would be certain banks that might have branches, but most of them will be looking at their customers to do online transactions in the near future.", do you mean near future from today or from 25 years hence? I ask because in Why Branch And Digital Channels Will Coexist Forever, I wrote about a bank that claims that (1) 90% of its transactions already happen via digital channels (2) it's still expanding its branch network (3) branches will always be around.