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Fully agree. I'd even venture out that banks can make money out of this service if they do it right: Ask the customer to do nothing more than enroll for the service, send two useful alerts per month for free and start charging for the third alert onwards. But, I won't hold my breath - banks don't seem to have heard of the "freemium" model. 

Dwolla is already doing this. It actually charges zero fees for transactions below US$ 10. While the attraction to merchants of such a service is self-evident, I haven't been able to figure out what's in it for the consumer. After all, with credit cards, consumers get deferred payment and rewards, which they don't with Dwolla / equivalent.

Banks have been doing Online Reputation Management (ORM) for a while now, with the focus being on spotting disgruntled customers and connecting with them before things spiral out of control and cause reputation damage. Props to MasterCard for demonstrating that there's a lot more - product design, identifying brand advocates, tracking competitors' actions, for example - to social media listening than just ORM. Hopefully, this spurs other banks and FIs to leverage social media intelligence more fully and translate the buzz into tangible business results. 

@AlexB: TY for the clarification. I agree, handsfree makes the experience lot more seamless. From the Tumblr blog, I notice that Google Glass fits like a Bluetooth headset, except over the eye / spectacles. It looks a bit eerie at first, but I remember that so did Bluetooth headsets when they first hit the market a few years ago.

No. Catch me if you can! Seriously, while I like AR, an AR app installed on a smartphone pretty much does what Google Glass promises to do. Besides, wearing goggles - of the analog or digital variety - on top of my existing prescription glasses has always proven challenging :). Now, if Google Glass also provides eyesight correction functionality, you might catch me wearing it! 

Lower fees is a powerful value proposition for merchants with Dwolla. Not sure what Dwolla offers for payers, though. I'm assuming that Dwolla doesn't offer deferred payment and reward points, two major attractions to payers of credit cards.

Mobile banking and payments have been around for years. Despite that, a large portion of customers involved in your research don't seem to want to use them. Whose court is the ball in? If customers', it might make more sense for banks to jettisson any further work around the mobile channel instead of fighting the losing battle of using it "to create a competitive advantage". If banks', can you offer any specific list of enhancements in the mobile channel that would result in greater customer adoption of the channel? Certainly, it can't be to provide a seamless online banking experience: Technically, mobile is a different channel than online, so "online banking experience" on a mobile is a logical fallacy. Besides, as I'd highlighted in my 3-part blog post titled Jumping On The Omnichannel Bandwagon over a year ago, seamless multichannel banking experience is neither required nor feasible. This recent Snarketing2.0 post substantiates my views.

Personally, I believe that banks can pump up mobile channel adoption rate by launching "Mobile 3.0" features - e.g. turn-by-turn navigation for ATM / Branches, Mobile RDC, and so on - by exploiting GPS, camera, voice recorder and other smartphone specs.  GoBank and a couple of other banks have already done this. Since PCs lack these specs, online banking will not be able to support these features, thus making the customer experience across multiple channels the opposite of seamless. In other words, a "seamy" customer experience will actually boost mobile channel usage. 

@AlexW: TY for your clarification. However, I can only talk of banks where such scripts do exist and were developed by one of my past employers. I do recognize that they don't feature in the list of banks - BNP Paribas, Commerzbank, etc. - involved in this initiative. Talking of which, since the article states, "trading flows in electronic markets have been automated", it's likely that this initiative itself has little to do with internal systems - such as the aforementioned scripts intended for internal use - but for automating customer-facing "processes for enabling clients" that "have remained highly manual".

Detailed article. According to anecdotal evidence, a lot of the nouveaux riche crave for societal recognition. If your research supports this, private banks and wealth management SBUs could deepen their engagement with this segment of customers by providing them with opportunities to speak during public events and otherwise fulfill their higher levels of needs and wants in the Maslow's inverted pyramid. 

Online password managers that do exactly this have been around for ages but no one can be faulted for being in the dark about them since they - i.e. online password managers - have never managed to achieve mainstream adoption in all this time. As I'd pointed out here, foreign language passwords or bank-provided eLockers might be a couple of solutions that meet the CSFs of usability, scalability, etc.