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Christopher.. Your post brings out an important point about the effectiveness of branch as a channel in providing advisory services that inspire confidence in a bank's brand especially if it is outsourced. With bank branches having become retail stores, carrying acute focus on sale of routine banking products, the depth of expertise in the personnel dispensing guidance that influence customers's financial decisions, has seen sharp erosion. Multi bank nature of the Post Office branches could overload its staff with finer details of product features, nuances related to bank specific procedures. This could quickly become a disservice morphing into a channel of diminished value where banking activity of sensitive nature cannot be accomplished. It could provide an unintended push for customer interactions to digital channels, questioning the merit of investment in such an attended channel.

Hi Sunil, Great post. I would further extend the thought to propose creation of a wider corelation matrix that covers ownership of physical assets such as refrigerators, cars, washing machines that are becoming digital assets in the rapid realization of the IOT scenario, capable of originating owner not present purchases. Imagine each of these transactions requiring the owner to provide 2FA through the day forcing her to forego few precious moments of attention from office work to understand the context of the transaction

I concur. There is a solid measure of enabling regulations buried under DFA that are meant to do a world of good. I cite two examples: DFA1033 has led to the emergence of consumer banking data aggregators such as Mint, Proper that have created beautiful apps that bring about an amazing convergence of transaction data, card balances, DDA balances, fetching them from bank sources, on the strength of the authority granted to them by the customers owning the banking relationships..This has unleashed the spirit of PS2 in the US environs. Similarly, DFA1073 has provided the ability for consumers to back out of a cross border transfer within 30 minutes of having placed the payment order. They can do this on the basis of another powerful guidance carried by the section i.e the visibility of important attributes of the transaction which previously where unavailable - value date, exchange rate, amount expected to reach at the other end of the transfer, cost of the transfer broken down into own bank fees, other bank fees. This feature sought to be enforced by the regulation is unprecedented in its reach and needs to be protected. Your post is on spot - broad brush repeal / consolidation of a full bodied regulation such as DFA could be detrimental.