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I wish this announcement explained why Vodafone pulled the plug on the pilot it had conducted at another Indian state (Rajasthan) last year and why we should take its current launch seriously. Vodafone now joins Airtel, the country's #1 MNO, that is currently on its third iteration of mobile payments. Hope they both enjoy better success this time.  

I remember reading about such cards several years ago. But, with Google rumored to be coming up with a plastic card version of its originally mobile Google Wallet product, cards seem to be coming back in fashion. Banks can spin it whichever way they like but, when they invest in a security solution, it has to be with the goal of shifting the onus of fraud to the cardholder or merchant. Since digital wallets don't support card-wise security, banks can't achieve their goal with them, can they?

Eric Schmidt must have said whatever he did about mobile more than a week ago. Because, as of last week, Google seems to be going exactly in the opposite direction by announcing that it is planning to release a plastic card version of a pure-play mobile product like Google Wallet. Seems like Google has finally realized the folly of trying to mobilize everything just for the sake of it, and / or to let its ex-CEO and present Executive Chairman work only on mobile.

Having said that, Mobile Banking has a lot of potential - as long as banks and technology providers don't treat it as just a portable version of Internet Banking. Smartphones have GPS, accelerometer, camera and many other things that PCs don't. Mobile banking apps - e.g. Mobile RDC - that leverage a smartphone's superior specs can deliver tremendous customer value.

I've always been a fan of making a contactless transaction without having to take out the payment instrument - aka contactless card - from my wallet / pocket / bag.  Most recently, I'd commented here that this is so cool that it would have made it into the latest Bond film. Happy to see this technology from Discover. But, I hope that it does not meet the same fate as Pay By Touch, which pioneered payment by fingerprint but flamed out within a year or two of launching but not before guzzling $$$M of VC funds.

Having seen VocaLink and Accenture deliver FPS to one UK bank, I'm sure they'll do a great job for many others, including in Australia.

Related to Kris K's comments about realtime bill payments, we're seeing a lot of traction in many geographies around this topic. The widespread use of QR codes in effect permits 1-click bill payments from a smartphone. In fact, frustrated at eBill penetration plateauing at less than 25% globally, many billers are eyeing immediate bill pay as a way to take eBill adoption to the next level. 

With the successful go-live of Actiance in NetSpend over a year ago, I'd hoped, in this post, "So, hopefully, the era of excuses will come to an end!" when it came to the use - or lack of it - of social media in banks and financial institutions. From your post, it appears that this hasn't happened! I agree with your list of do's and dont's of social media implementation in banks. Just wanted to add that, by now, even basic social media tools (e.g. HootSuite) support "maker-checker" functionality whereby posts prepared by the rank-and-file can be put through an approval process, so that only permitted posts get published. This further mitigates reputation and compliance risks in social media for BFSI companies. Customer service is a low hanging fruit for social media that has a clear-cut ROI as I'd explained here.   

25%: App freeze or crash; 17%: Unable to open apps. These problems are often linked to drop in Internet connection (a separate 25%), pushing up the incidence of this root cause to 67%. In other words, two-thirds of problems are beyond the control of the bank that provides the mobile app. It is customary for mobile apps (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) and even some desktop apps (e.g. Google AdWords, Skype) to be built with additional resilience so that they are able to stay connected or reestablish connectivity on the face of fading or broken Internet connections. However, security forces banking apps to do exactly the opposite: Deactivate the app after a minute or two of inactivity, even if the Internet connection is fine. Therefore, mobile banking apps are stuck between a rock and a hard place: Break the session and frustrate users, persist the session and compromise security. The only way out I see is for them to build similar resilience but focus on non walled-garden functionality that don't have to be deactivated at all. There was a blog post on Finextra a few months ago - can't locate it now - that provided a list of useful features for mobile banking that did not require customers to log on. 

To make a mobile payment on an NFC mobile, payers have to fidget around with their smartphone, switch on NFC, fire up the mobile wallet app, choose the right card, hope for network coverage, and so forth. Didn't realize until now that it takes an Olympic triathlon gold medal winner to jump so many hoops! 

On a more serious note, "...they want all of the benefits and rewards they've come to expect from their credit card." brings up an important point. Customers will qualify for the basic rewards by using their credit cards, whether in the plastic or mobile form factor. Offers expected to stimulate the shift in consumer preference to the mobile form factor should then be in excess of the baseline rewards anyway provided by the card issuer. Wonder who is going to fund those additional rewards. 

Google itself seems to think so. Plastic Card + Offers could just be the spark that ignites widespread adoption of Google Wallet, which has hitherto had a lukewarm reception by being shackled to NFC mobiles.

http://gigaom.com/2012/11/01/is-google-looking-beyond-nfc-reportedly-prepping-plastic-wallet-cards

Needs of corporates will justifiably keep growing with time. But, before loading them into external systems from banks and SEPA as additional requirements, it helps to look inside corporates and see how well their internal systems can cope with such changes in the first place. Having worked with several corporates on ERP and MDM solutions, most of them can't handle auto-reconciliation between their own Sales Orders, Invoices, Delivery Notes and Installation Reports or across their multiple internal channels. For example, when my 3-in-1 printer-scanner-copier device recently failed, I had to call the manufacturer's call center to log a complaint. I had registered the device on the company's website immediately after installing it but the CSR had no record of me or my device (My device was bought a month ago, I have been a registered customer of this company for 10 years). I had to go through the entire process again. The printer's self-diagnostics printout carries a 14-digit serial number but the CSR insisted that I had to give him a 10-digit number only. The moment we sorted this out, my ticket was assigned to another company, which was the manufacturer's authorized service provider. Chaos multiplied at this stage - the same device even had a different model number on this company's system!  

I could go on and on but my point is, corporates can't justifiably demand auto-reconciliation of receipts coming from external systems with internally-generated invoices as a Day One feature from SEPA.