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For reasons I'd highlighted in this Finextra post, shopping cart abandonment is surely a problem in India, UK and many other countries in the ROW that use 2FA for online payments. However, online checkout is highly frictionless on US ecommerce websites with none of them I've come across using 3DS and a couple not even asking for credit card CVV. I'm not sure if simplifying the checkout process any further will really improve "browser to buyer" conversion rate. We'll see...

That's US$ 3.25M per card. Since when did prepaid cards support this kind of stored value? Even before the crooks entered the scene, it seems like Bank Muscat's prepaid card program was compromised by extremely incomptent design that permitted such a thing to happen in the first place.

NACHA EBIDS delivers bills via Internet Banking portals. Bill Me Later (BML) provides online credit on ecommerce websites on the fly i.e. without prior registration. Although it was piloted back in 2005, I think EBIDS was finally launched in the USA only last year. BML - later acquired by eBay - has been around in the USA for over 5 years and, by now, it might've entered Europe via Amazon and other e-tailers.

As I'd highlighted in Bridging Social Media With Traditional Customer Service Channels on my company's blog, "it’s too early to bridge social media with conventional customer service systems". While tools are available to extract positive / negative / neutral sentiment from social media messages, some messages are NSFW, others contain no actionable info and some of them are too obtuse to be figured out even by humans. In their current form, if social media messages enter formal customer service systems, there's a good chance that chaos will ensure. Another trend we're seeing on the ground is for companies to accept service requests only via Twitter. Unlike Facebook and other social networks, Twitter restricts posts to 140 characters, thereby forcing customers to stick to the point and enabling tools to enumerate their sentiment accurately.

It's commendable that all these extra features are getting tacked on to the humble ATM but has anybody studied their impact on queue lengths? End-of-the-day, ATMs are shared devices and low waiting times are critical to superior CX. Around a year or two ago, my bank introduced a "My Favorite Transaction" that reduced the number of keystrokes - and hence the time - required to execute a customary transaction on its ATMs. This reduced queue lengths significantly. For that reason alone, I consider it one of the most innovative features to be implemented on ATMs in recent times.

Not only is plastic not going away from credit cards but it seems to be entering cash as well!

Nowhere is the tradeoff between convenience and security more pronounced than in mobile banking. There's a school of thought according to which "banking is banking is banking, therefore mobile banking must use the  same level of security as Internet Banking". However, I'm not sure if many members of this group would be comfortable about entering so many details on the touchscreen keyboards of their smartphones. There lies one of the major hurdles to adoption of mobile banking.

On another note, if UK customers don't really care much for mobile banking, banks shouldn't spend too much time and energy in this area. IMHO, it doesn't make any business sense to keep pushing a mobile banking agenda just to avoid falling behind the innovation curve. 

Just stumbled on to Finsphere, a company that recognizes that minimizing false-positives is key for cardholders and provides a solution for doing so. (Full Disclosure: I have no personal or professional affiliation with Finsphere) 

Nice article, TY for pointing it out @AlexP.

@PaulP: Sorry but Wal-Mart hasn't exactly had a great track record in heralding new technologies - at least not in the last 10 years. Three years ago, I'd pointed out in my personal blog post Will Wal-Mart Succeed With EMV Where It Failed With RFID? that Wal-Mart hadn't achieved much success with RFID. I'm now inclined to believe that its EMV pioneering efforts are unlikely to bear fruit.