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This "don't give a damn about individual customer preferences" approach is ludicrously out of synch with current customer engagement best practices around segmentation, targeting, 1-to-1 marketing, etc. Besides, cutting costs is a stupid move when it can result in loss of much greater revenues, as it does in this case: As I'd highlighted in Save Costs But Lose Revenues With eBills And eStatements, "By turning off paper, billers ... save a few pennies ... but ... lose a lot of dollars..."

@CharmaineO & @NickC:

According to his tweet, Bill Gates himself seems to have pushed back the the period of significant change in retail payments to 15 years!

https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/563010428511735810

Today, 2 billion people don’t have a bank account. In 15 years they’ll be making payments with their phones: b-gat.es/1F65ZXa @verge 

From personal experience, I entirely agree with the findings of this study.

It's much easier to annotate a paper credit card statement with a highlighter than an eStatement for things like potentially wrong charges. 

I've blogged and commented to this contrary-to-conventional-wisdom effect on several occasions:

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=6106

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=6281

Am finally glad that empirical studies bear out this viewpoint - again, I notice, contrary to common wisdom: "While many respondents said receiving information in an electronic format helped them manage their finances better, the result of the behavioural experiment found the opposite was true."

From personal experience, I'm reasonably sure that Julia Roberts didn't have to forge Richard Gere's signature: One of my colleagues in my ex-employer's Miami office owed the rest of us in the office a treat. The day we were to go out of lunch at her cost, she couldn't join us. She just handed over her credit card to one of us. After the meal at a neighboring Burger King / KFC / McDonalds - I don't remember which - we just handed over the cardholder-not-present's card at the checkout. The attendant swiped it, printed out the chargeslip and didn't ask for a signature, thereby forsaking any need for forgery.

@PaulL + 1 - and a compelling and high-value one at that. Many hackers have reportedly been offered jobs by the same organization they were caught hacking into. Likewise, I hope these two guys are hired at senior levels in any one of many companies that have only been blabbing nonstop about Big Data and / or mastering the techniques of how to lie with it. 

@KatM:

TY for your reply.

Re. feature set:

Personally, I'm biased towards the omnichannel approach whereas you seem to favor the multichannel approach. I've written about my view of the difference between the two in From Multichannel To Omnichannel And Beyond. At the time, I said multichannel was "neither necessary nor feasible". Now, according to this McKinsey article, multichannel has reportedly been a bad use of IT budgets!

Given the current state of the art in security technology, I tend to believe that it's impossible for a bank to overcome the challenge of "rounding out the app featureset without compromising the ease of use".

Re. granularity:

I tend to agree that repeating the download-install-enroll process for each unbundled mobile app can be frustrating. That said, similar frustrations can happen even on the desktop web. For example, the bank stock trading portal I recently wrote about in Banks Have Nothing To Fear From Neobanks supports trading in Equity, F&O, Funds, Bonds, Foreign Markets, and so on. While all these products are available inside a single portal, each one of them requires separate enrollment including branch visit in some cases. Hardly an example of good UX but I'm willing to give the benefit of doubt to the bank for choosing to go that way despite the obvious compromise in UX - after all, the bank's portal otherwise trumps the UX of all nonbank stock trading portals hollow. Maybe the same logic applies for unbundled mobile apps as well. 

That said, the Swiss Army Knife Android app that I recently came across provides a great example of how to strike the right balance between “too many fine-grained apps with superior UX” on the one hand and “one single coarse-grained monolithic app with inferior UX” on the other. Like how the Swiss Army Knife physical product showed the optimum way of combining multiple tools into one easy-to-use toolkit, I think its app is going to serve as a lighthouse for how to combine multiple apps into one easy-to-use "app bundle".

@Anon: Under a recent drive launched by the government of India, more than 120M people were able to open regular bank accounts with fairly "lightbrush" KYC. On the other hand, opening a mobile money account via Airtel or Vodafone is quite painful, as I'd highlighted in this post: https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=9273. Therefore, even if you don't share my overall skepticism about "banking the unbanked" (https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=9777), the notion that mobile payments can reach the underbanked is a myth - at least as of the present regulatory framework in India.

This report seems to be assigning a lower rating for a mobile app that has fewer features. This runs counter to the current best practice of developing mobile apps as lightweight apps with fewer, purpose-built features instead of matching their web counterparts feature-to-feature. It'd also be interesting to know if Adaptive Lab rated these mobile apps for features (e.g. Mobile RDC, Account opening by scanning a Drivers License) that leverage camera, GPS and other standard smartphone specs that are absent on a desktop / laptop and hence can’t be supported by NetBanking.

@AbhishekC:

Nothing. I've referred to the Card on Delivery in #3 & #4 of my last comment. However, this option is not widely available. Far as I know, only Flipkart offers it in my city (Pune, India). Even in the case of Flipkart, the courier who came to deliver my two recent consignments didn't carry the POS 2X in a row and insisted on cash. I steadfastly refused and tweeted to the company to ensure that they honored their promise to accept Card on Delivery. Only then did the courier bring the POS and I could pay by card. Only Flipkart can answer why such a thing happens regularly. 

On another note, banking the unbanked is only one part of the whole picture: I know enough merchants who have bank accounts but are still not able to accept card paymentts. To quote a recent example, a store in my neighborhood used to accept cards until recently but is now unable to do so. Apparently, ever since his POS got upgraded, it no longer works on his old telephone. To make it work, he needs a new telephone, the cost of which he finds prohibitive. Hence, he has stopped accepting cards. Regulation (PIN), TELCO (infra) and other factors pose as severe a hurdle towards fostering a cashless economy as unbankedness or tax evasion motives of the merchant community.

@NickC: Good one! The elongated period puts an even greater question mark on the survival of alternative payments providers. I just saw a headline that Amazon has pulled the plug on its mobile wallet product.