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One bank legally accessing customers of its competitors. Whoa! It's a watershed moment, especially for me with my sales and marketing background. Surely something that they don't teach at Harvard Business School.

Don't have figures for UK but, according to this study by Cornerstone Advisors of the US retail banking market, the Goliaths have done a good enough job with digital banking and have stolen a huge march over Davids who haven't done much better and are lagging way behind the Goliaths in customer base.

"The continued spend on bricks-and-mortar stands in direct contrast to the bank's peers, who have been slashing branch numbers". This totally resonates with what I wrote in Why Branch And Digital Channels Will Coexist Forever.

"... churn in branch count driven by digital channels will be specific to individual banks rather than being a secular issue that sweeps the entire banking industry. In other words, some banks will open new branches whereas others will close existing branches."

Like I said, trying to target Millennials is nothing new. Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpuru said two years ago in Bloomberg: 

“There’s this obsession with millennials. The truth is millennials aren’t spending any money with anybody because they don’t have any.”

Based on personal experience, I've been saying for a long time - like I've done in this post - that (1) traditional banks are fairly good at digital banking (2) fintechs don't offer sensationally better digital banking. Now there's research to support that. 

The Neobank Threat: How Worried Should Banks Be?

When I wrote this post, somebody had privately counseled me to avoid using superlatives like "nothing to fear", instead advising me to hedge with "little to fear". I stuck to my guns because "nothing" was exactly what I felt based on my personal experience.

Now, there's research saying the same thing:

The Neobank Threat: How Worried Should Banks Be? 

IME, apps from banking are far more robust than those from any other industry barring, maybe, ecommerce and transportation.

It'd help if you could cite 2-3 examples of problems caused in banking systems that could've been averted by more / better testing. Memory serves, the RBS issue was caused by the bombing of an update in production despite the fact that the same update had been tested and found okay in staging. Not sure what kind of testing could've prevented such a disaster.

Not saying there's no scope for improvement of testing in banking but credit where credit's due. One clear area for improvement I see is improving the testing methods so as to reduce downtime caused by planned maintenance. I don't see the Amazons and Expedias of the world shutting down for planned maintenance very often and wonder why the HSBCs and HDFC Banks should.

I covered two examples of Blockchain insurance in AXA Fizzy - The New Kid On The Blockchain and Atlas Etherisc - Another New Kid On The Blockchain. Claimless settlement is the key customer benefit. But, as I've highlighted in both posts, that doesn't need Blockchain. It can be accomplished equally well via electronic versions of conventional contracts. That roughly speaks to your point #1. I honestly don't get the Blockchain advantage under your point #2 and #3. 

End of the day, insurance buyers don't decide the architecture of insurance apps - insurers do. Blockchain must have a compelling benefit for insurers if they were to move their existing insurance apps to the Blockchain. And there is. I'll be covering it in a follow on post.

TBH, you're deluding yourself if you think previous generations were agreeable to restart the thread from the beginning at every touchpoint with the bank. If anything, Millennials are more tolerant of repetition, especially while dealing with authority figures like bankers. 

The way big banks work, Corporate Banking and Retail Banking operate as two silos. They rarely share any information, let alone details of their loan applicants. There's little scope for retail banking to target rejects of corporate banking. Assuming it even wants to. 

NO, it's NOT early days for millennial strategy. Banks have been trying it for several years. Just that it hasn't worked all that well and has almost exited their strategic agenda.

What Citizens Bank did now with student loans has nothing do with targeting of Millennials. It has been doing similar things forever with people of college-going age, whether they belonged to Baby Boomers or Gen X or Millennial generation. Ditto other banks. I'm wondering if you're confusing Millennials with people of a certain age.

The Wells Fargo study cited by you confirms exactly what I'm saying - banks don't want to give loans / LOC to Millennials.

Bankers are savvy business people - they know what people say in surveys is not necessarily what they do in actual practice. When BofA recently tweaked its checking account terms to make it harder to qualify for a free checking account, Millennials didn't say, "great, here's the money I'm willing to pay more as a Millennial for financial products and services". They didn't even threaten to close their accounts with BofA. Funnily, BofA doesn't want them, but they still want to cling to BofA.

You can keep quoting studies of what Millennials want from banks but all that matters is what banks are willing to provide them. It'd be helpful if you can quote reports wherein banks have acknowledged that they've made so much extra revenue or profits from Millennials by using a Millennial Framework to target and engage with Millennials in a specific manner.