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@Alex B:

Yet another excellent post! I'm sure that your approach, combined with a few BEFORE-AFTER videos of "Cutting the cost of customer administration?" and other strong use cases, will work much better at getting banks to adopt social media than most of the other impractical guidance going around these day. 

An old example used by the famous management guru Tom Peters comes to mind: You could build lifejackets from concrete. As long as you say this upfront and do exactly as you say, you can achieve 100% compliance ( under ISO9000 quality norms). On the other hand, you might not be around to realize the high risk inherent in your action! 

@AlexB:

Great post! I've written several times myself about the high degree of friction involved with many Internet Banking portals and readily empathize with your views.

I'd even go one step further and say that "info and transactions should be placed at the venue where customers are likely to find them most naturally". Barring fund transfer and a few other transactions, Internet Banking is not this venue.

You've already mentioned account balance. Let me mention another use case that I've sought for many times but never found: Suppose I wish to remit some money from UK to India. Obviously, high GBP:INR exchange rate would be an important criteria for me to decide when, and with which bank, I should put through this transaction. Today, I've to suffer the friction of visiting one or more banks' Internet Banking portal(s) and, with some banks, be forced to log on, to source the latest exchange rate several times over a period of a few days. Tomorrow, if only a certain bank provided this info via RSS feed on my desktop, like news feeds, I'd be sure to give my remittance business to it.

A bank's exchange rate is not proprietary info. I don't see why it should be placed on its website, either inside the walled garden or outside it. Still, I've never come across any bank offering this feature.

Without denying the importance of accountability, I'm also mindful of the clamor around measurement of marketing ignoring certain ground realities viz. (a) High cost and expertise for measurement tools make it impractical for all but the top spending marketers to adopt them (b) Metrics that can be measured often lack resonance with functions outside marketing. For example, marketing will claim high effectiveness of a certain online ad because it generated heavy incremental website traffic or Facebook Likes or whatever, but sales would only be impressed with qualified leads and revenues, finance with profits, and CEO with EPS - none of which can be measured by using even the most state-of-the-art marketing measurement tools and techniques.

In all this clamor, one thing is undeniable: When marketing works, it generates returns far in excess of what it costs. Which is perhaps why marketing continues to flourish more than a century after prominent people have raised questions about which part of marketing works and which part doesn't.

For greater adoption of measurement in marketing, I think the trick is to get the level of granularity of metrics right.

@MichaelK: 

Thank you for your comment. Unfortunately, I haven't come across a single biller offering the facility to change e-bill or -statement password to one of my choosing! I'm not even sure if it's technically possible to change passwords for 'asynch' items like these. Please let me know if you're familiar with any. Thanks in advance.

I think the real challenge is that SEPA only seems to be a compliance exercise. The onus is really on SEPA / EPC to promote it differently if they want banks and corporates to view it as a business opportunity. 

Hopefully, this appointment will enable ClairMail to replicate the North American success with its 2-way SMS Alert in Europe. 

Kudos to PNC for using state-of-the-art mobile technology to help customers do what an overwhelming majority of them say they want to do, namely, find and reach branches, instead of falling for the hype, closing down branches and forcing customers to adopt mobile banking. This move also resonates strongly with Gartner's advice in the following report to use mobile to "augment a real-time experience or activity to provide information or content in context" instead of merely as an extension to the online channel. 

Get your complimentary copy of Executive Advisory: The Untapped Potential of Mobile: Connecting the Physical World to the Online World. (registration required)

In case we are talking about UK, unless I am missing something, it is not clear what kind of electronic payments are being referred to here: Card payments, CHAPS and FPS happen in realtime, I am not sure if there is a 3 day waiting period in the first place. If we are talking about BACS, I don't see how 'card' and 'phone' enter the picture. Since we are talking about online, I take it that any card payment would imply Card Not Present, in which case there is no need for a phone or for the card to be in close proximity to the phone even if we are talking about mobile payments via cards - we could have left the card somewhere and could be entering card details from memory (unlikely) or from an PDA / smartphone entry containing the card details (highly likely, from personal experience). Won't proximity correlation logic result in many False Positives?

Compared to telephone verification (for each transaction), Realtime SMS Alert provides a more cost-effective and less frictional method of detecting card fraud. The Indian regulator has made it mandatory for all card transactions in India since July 2011. 2-way SMS Alert goes a step further and can even prevent card fraud. As with all technologies, design and implementation challenges remain, as I'd pointed out in these Finextra posts:

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=5772

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=5801

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=5936