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Brilliant post! It's going to be Apple that does it again: As I'd predicted at the time of its launch, iOS Passbook - once it starts supporting payment cards - is going to be the mobile wallet that crosses the chasm by making the "which app, which card" decision effortless. 

We absolutely require more innovation of this nature. Like I'd commented on the article, "May this open the floodgates for other password-less features on mobile banking such as forex rates, last 3 transactions, credit card due amount, etc." Banks invest a lot of time and money in developing and marketing mobile banking apps and they're perfectly justified in expecting high adoption rates for them. If a few innocuous things like displaying account balances without password increases convenience and results in higher adoption rates - which it will, I'm sure - why should banks hold back on doing them?  

Data doesn't support many of this article's assertions:

• According to this article and my comment therein, banks are faring quite well on all these lawsuits, with the tally reading 3:2 in favor of banks. Interestingly, in the latest lawsuit, the court found in favor of the bank because the bank offered 2FA and 2PA on Internet Banking and the corporate declined it.  
• According to this article, fraud as a percentage of transaction value is actually going down.
• Emptying bank accounts from a mobile app is simply not possible as my comments here explain.

When startups like Mint and BillGuard, to name a few, lure customers to hand over their Internet Banking credentials lock-stock-and-barrel to them, we laud them for their innovativeness and claim that they'd disintermediate banks from financial services. On the other hand, when banks wake up and finally do something about reducing friction from their online / mobile transactions, we chastise them. Down with this double standard!

Some banks are already using social intelligence platforms to hone in their competitors' disgruntled customers and win them over with special offers. If the fence sitters need any more reasons to jump over the wall, they can find them here:

The Business Case For Social Media Customer Service

Props to @BankoftheWest. May this open the floodgates for other password-less features on mobile banking such as forex rates, last 3 transactions, credit card due amount, etc.

Maybe as a part of fiscal control or whatever, POBO for AP is used by default in India and Middle East, if not in many other countries. POBO for AR - centralized follow up for invoices raised by multiple SBUs and depositing all collections into a single treasury account - has also been around for a long time in the Middle East. There's an interesting Q&A on this subject here.

As I'd commented here, I agree with your view that the incidence of CAT is very low. Re. "dual controls for payment release" as a potential fraud mitigating measure, interestingly, as this verdict shows, banks seem to have started offering this functionality but corporates, at least the one that lost this lawsuit, are declining it!

GenY Mobile / Direct Carrier Billing Payment (e.g. Boku, Zong) have cracked the Holy Grail of Security Versus Convenience, although they're still too expensive to gain mainstream adoption. To me, biometrics belongs to a broader category of technologies - which also includes AI, voice recognition and OCR among others - that are adequately reliable only at price points that put them out of reach of all but a few usage scenarios. In a test I was associated with around six years ago, one model of a fingerprint scanner costing $25 delivered <10% accuracy whereas another one that delivered >99% accuracy cost $500. The former was affordable-but-inaccurate and the latter, accurate-but-unaffordable, for a classical PC login use case. Apart from that, even when it's affordable and reliable in the one-odd use case, biometrics triggers privacy concerns that hamper onboarding, as the flameout of PayByTouch illustrates.

In my recent experience, many banks are doing a good job at listening to what their customers are saying about them on social media by using social intelligence platforms. They're using the insight so gained not only for cross-selling and upselling but also to finetune their offerings and resolve issues far more quickly than via conventional customer service channels. 

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=6505

Kudos to your adult education center for striking the right balance between security and convenience. I've long held that security levels, cash v. card and other issues related to payments should be left to the discretion of the customer and the merchant, who're the two most interested parties to any payment transaction. Regulators, security solutions providers and other middlemen imposing their own views - if not products and services - often turn out to be 'meddle'men providing little value addition.

Good idea but I wonder if it's too little, too late. Banking customers are already tweeting ideas to banks in 140 characters. Savvy bank product managers are already using social intelligence platforms to quickly hone into such tweets and add good ideas to their feature pipelines. Ideas that have surfaced on Twitter in the recent past include (1) Change the schedule of weekly account balance SMS alerts (2) Introduce a "My Favorite Transaction" to cut down ATM waiting times (3) Personify bank balance.