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I'd commented in the specific context of your statement that there's a "palpable void in payment chain...", which was the only Call To Action for banks and FIs that I could spot in the entire article. If you're also calling upon banks to use their transaction data to craft personalized, LBS offers, I agree with you. In fact, I've voiced similar views myself in a recent Finextra post and comments:

Save Costs But Lose Revenues With eBills And eStatements

A Banking Product Made to Order

There's no shortage of payment products that stoke impulse purchases. Amazon 1-Click, Google Wallet and PayPal are a few examples of products that don't make consumers enter 80-100 keystrokes of payment information before putting through a purchase transaction. Since they all operate on existing banking rails and pay toll by way of interchange fees to banks and card networks, there's really no pressing need for banks and FIs to build such products by themselves.

Question is, to what extent do regulators allow such payment products to deliver on their fundamental promise of enabling frictionless payments? Here, the situation is highly mixed. In some countries (e.g. USA), regulators don't interfere and these payment methods do permit impulse purchase. In others (e.g. India), they mandate two-factor authentication to the extreme degree (e.g. even for IVR and mobile payments), thereby nipping impulse purchase in the bud. 

Using a Twitter Sentiment analysis tool, we see RBS at 17% POSITIVE vs. 83% NEGATIVE and NATWEST at 28% POSITIVE vs. 72% NEGATIVE. With such an overwhelmingly negative sentiment, we can be sure that negative comments haven't been removed. After reading some of the negative tweets, I was shocked at the sheer amount of NSFW content present in them. Wonder if both banks might pull out of social media only for this reason, the way ICICI Bank in India partially did by refusing to entertain customer complaints on its FB page. By staying away from social media, banks will surely lose the opportunity to stoke positive feedback from their advocates. But, as a bank, they do have a commitment to keep their real estates free of such bad language, whether they deserve it or not.

Facebook as source of KYC is an interesting idea. I've heard that SQUARE already uses a potential merchant's social media presence to judge its risk profile and decide whether to give it a SQUARE account or not. Hopefully, cash-strapped smaller banks will switch to FB for KYC instead of developing and maintaining internal KYC systems. But, mainstream adoption will need getting the regulators on board to the idea. Besides, FB can only provide proof of identity whereas most bank KYC also requires proof of address, for which FB is not a trusted source. Photoshoppable utility bills are not the only source of address verification in many parts of the world. Many countries use AVS web services as well.  

Props to Cisco for getting this spot on. When I wrote about how banks could go omnichannel in my 3-part blog post Jumping On The Omnichannel Bandwagon, I was going largely by personal experience and anecdotal evidence. Happy to see research that establishes conclusively that customers really want different channels for different purposes and, at times, a combination of different channels for the same transaction. The behavior data given on slide 6 of the deck is especially telling. 

Literally hundreds of other banks and financial institutions don't seem to be having such problems despite many of their development and support staff being located in Mumbai / Bangalore / Hyderabad / Chennai / Pune / Manila / Latvia, etc. Having witnessed first hand the problems caused by the collision of mobile and web technologies with decades-old mainframe-based accounting systems masquerading as core banking systems at other banks, I'd bet my bottom dollar on Datamonitor's prognosis.

If ePayments really provide a viable option to cheques, how come there's still so much innovation in the USA around cheque usage e.g. Mobile RDC?

I suspect that more consumers and corporates understand cheque alternatives than have adopted them. This is because cheque alternatives available today pose a lot of friction. They also expect too much change in payor behavior without giving anything significant back in return. Only when these facets of ePayments change can we expect them to replace cheques. I'm afraid they've a long way to go in this regard, as I'd pointed out in this Finextra post.

Sitting in India, it's news to me that cheque volumes are raising here! In fact, we keep reading any number of reports, including ones put out by our banking regulator RBI, claiming that ePayments like RTGS and NEFT (ACH-equivalent) are blockbuster hits and that cheque usage is rapidly diminishing in India. Just goes to show that you can find five different figures in three different reports!

In our experience, varying product parameters to come up with offers for segments of "one" or even "few" is very challenging for banks for several reasons: (1) Their viability for banks may be questionable, as in the above example (2) They may lead to customer dissatisfaction e.g. when a customer who gets a mortgage at 10% interest learns that another customer has received the same mortgage at 8% from the same bank (3) Regulators may not permit such variations and offers.

We expect offers to be viable and successful only when they incorporate the element of "intent" into them. Offers doing that may not even need any product variations. For example, a customer has a monthly income of 10K (in whatever currency, it doesn't matter for this example), s/he regularly spends 2-3K per month on his / her credit card for 6 months. Then, during the seventh month, the credit card spend shoots up to 8K. For obvious reasons, even a plain-vanilla product offer made in Month 7 to "Convert your credit card outstandings to Equated Monthly Instalments" is both likely to be viable and successful.

Although I've been exposed to voice-based authentication for 6-7 years, I recognize that it could've become reliable enough by now to enter the mainstream. It'd be interesting to see some empirical data of VBA's true-negative and false-positive rates on the basis of live implementations or field trials.

Apple's share of the smartphone market has been flat / declining ever since Android gained traction. Does it mean that the iPhone is dying? Likewise, diminishing use of cheques - after cards and EFTs entered the payments landscape - is no reason to conclude that they're a dying breed. Fact is, for the payor, there's nothing more efficient, secure or convenient than cheques. Which is why they've been around for the past 300 years and I won't be surprised if they'll be around for the next 300.