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As next step, is there anything stopping banks from doing a channel-wise customer profitability analysis and jettisoning low-margin customers who show a predilection to use a certain channel? 

@AFinextraMember: One more advantage of cheques, I guess! Just joking, since most accounting standards - including GAAP - require a company to make a provision for the cheque amount in its books of accounts as soon as it issues a cheque, so there might really be no such advantage. 

Unless vendors get their acts together, CTOs might not want to take the risk of putting their necks on the chopping block by taking the lead on such topics:

6 Reasons Why Banks Can't Transform Legacy Applications

If not bank accounts, mobile wallet customers have to have registered their credit or debit or prepaid cards with the mobile wallet provider, otherwise what funding method would the mobile wallet use? Refunds could be made electronically but they are being made via paper cheques.

If wannable cash- and cheque-killers like mobile wallets themselves have to use cheques, why won't the common man? This explains why mobile wallets are dying. If this is what @TimT meant by his emphasis on cheque, I fully agree.

Many banks justify their inertia by citing regulation. While they're right on many occasions, there could be specific initiatives that are not embargoed by the regulator. Using a social intelligence platform to spot and acquire competitors' disgruntled customers might come under that niche category. Now that one of their own ilk has set the ball rolling, I'm sure many more banks will join the gang and deploy their ORM teams to do lot more than just take defensive action. 

Dropping a coin into a piggy bank conveys saving money. While local culture might rule out such an obvious gesture, I'm not sure how many customers will find the shake of a handset to be more intuitive than just tapping the SAVE button on the screen. On another note, with Apple doing away with skeumorphism altogether in the latest version of iOS, if "'Shake N Save' is a "significant initiative in Emirates NBD's on-going strategy to encourage customer migration to digital banking", I'm curious to know what some of the bank's less significant initiatives in this strategy are.

No. But the only problem is, he's the one giving the jobs, not seeking it :(.

Good news for SWIFT and banks but this could wipe out the half dozen or so vendors who have flourished by providing onpremise sanctions screening solutions to individual banks. 

Fully agree. It's friction like this that is stunting the growth of ePayments and making people - me included - to go back to cheques. Apart from A2A, you can see similar examples on bill payment and other NetBanking screens. From personal experience, fixing these friction hot spots is not very hard and results in a manifold increase in NetBanking usage by existing customers as well as in acquisition of new customers.

We've learned from our work with an insurance company that up to 15% of Tweets received on social media customer service channel are actually not complaints but queries / requests which are one step away from becoming opportunities for upsell and cross-sell. However, since the staff manning the social media customer service channel are typically from the ORM space, they operate with scripts. For them to convert these tweets to sales, they need social intelligence tools that can pick out the proverbial needle from the haystack. Can you cite any success story of a bank / FI / insurer using social media for sales? I'm asking because Avaya, the example you've cited, is not from the BFSI industry and many banks we've spoken to cite regulatory hurdles in doing this.