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Interesting to note that even the Starbucks app "didn’t start off as a way to pay" but as a digital store of loyalty points & and gift cards. http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Why-Silicon-Valley-thinks-we-hate-our-wallets-5955638.php

Large US banks are now even shedding their corporate customers:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/banks-urge-clients-cash-elsewhere-015700767.html

I only said multichannel banking is "neither necessary nor feasible". According to this McKinsey article, multichannel integration has also been a bad use of IT budgets for banks!

"pre-paid credit card". Typo? Or does the 18-34 y.o target segment really fall for oxymorons like that?

@JimW: I agree with you that expecting big banks to "bank the unbanked" is fool's errand. But perhaps for a different reason. Unlike many other countries, 70% of the banking industry in India is majority-owned by the government. While public sector banks must make money like their private sector brethren, they're bound by their charters to also serve the "social good". As a result, Big Banks can be found in all parts of India. The reason why they still can't bank the unbanked? Speed and greed, two basic human drivers, as I'd highlighted in "Calling B.S On Banking The Unbanked" (https://www.finextra.com/blogs/Fullblog.aspx?blogid=9777).

Am I missing something or does this long article really give no credit to retail banking for pioneering loyalty programs ages ago via credit card reward programs? 

Payment factories are also thwarted by the vastly different characteristics - realtime v. T+2, high v. low value, high v. low touch, etc. - of the different types of payments handled by large banks. At a Top 5 UK bank, what began as a grand plan to build a single, unified, global payments platform, ended up with multiple factories, one each for FPS, TARGET2, SEPA, USA, Europe, Emerging Markets, and so on. Automobile companies have manage to produce different car models inside a single factory by using multiple production lines. I guess software engineering has not yet reached the same level of maturity to be able to support widely varying payment types on a single payment factory.

I guess ARMS, MBS, CDS, CDO and the like are too two-dimensional to pass muster with today's battle-worn regulators and investors. It was but natural that AMCs needed to upgrade to 3D. Something tells me you can't take a quick glance at your StockCity and understand whether your portfolio has gone up or down. I admire these AMCs for thinking of newer and newer ways to obfuscate reality!

Any idea if the new challenger banks are only interested in luring the mass affluent accountholders away from the old banks to themselves or they're also eying the unbanked segment of the population? This will strongly influence how old banks reconfigure their branch / omnichannel processes and technologies in response to the new challenger banks.

Much as silos don't help data scientists, they're there for a reason: Efficient management of large companies. Almost every book on excellence I've read advises large companies to be broken up into multiple SBUs, which each SBU allowed to operate fairly independently. Silos are a necessary evil of that independence. IMO, it's beyond the scope of even a CIO, let alone a humble data scientist, to break silos in large corporations.

That said, data scientists can and should aspire to desilo tiny slivers of business processes and data types, as I've illustrated in the example of the use of data mining in my blog post: https://www.finextra.com/blogs/Fullblog.aspx?blogid=10094