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This is atrocious. I've heard about incidents of "temporary transfers" of funds from authorised to unauthorised accounts with a few other banks as well. I hope I'm wrong but this may just be the tip of the iceberg in the banking industry. On a side note, I totally agree with @PeterRobinson - US$ 185M fine is a rounding error in the P&L of a bank of WF's size.

I tend to agree with Panos Archondakis. Not that I have any personal experience with wealth management - sigh:( - but I still remember an article on Sunday Times London from 2007-8 in which a British celebrity (forget his name) had said that even with a bank balance of GBP 26M, he got very little service, let alone any personalized service, from his bank.

@JacobChristiansen: I too wonder about the same thing! Problem is that getting the basics right won't give any talking points to their C-Suite in their cocktail circuit! 

@MichaelKyritsis: Good catch LOL:) Now that you've mentioned it, the guy in the picture is likely not making a mobile payment at all. Most probably, he's awaiting the SMS OTP on his mobile phone, which he needs to complete a normal plastic payment on a desktop website! We go through this in India regularly! Mobile OTP: Cyanide Or Caffeine For Online Payments?

Even if banks have kept quiet about it, their suppliers have disclosed how banks leverage data. And there's a strong reason why banks may not want to do so in retail banking.

Over the past 5-7 years, I've heard various phrases like "cusp of disruption" and "mainstay payment method" that predicted the imminent boom in mobile payments. I'll add "verge of revolution" to that list. I wish mobile payment goes mainstream ASAP so that I don't have to suffer these cliches any more. But, alas, with the adoption of even Apple Pay - arguably the best mobile payment ever - declining year on year, I don't think my wish will be fulfilled any time soon.

If UK banks are interested, they can learn how to improve CX from their counterparts in USA, China and India. In these three countries, Banking provides the best CX of all industries, according to Forrester.

@AlexKreger:

On a side note, I was not talking about power and resources. I was talking about banks making highest profits of any industry. If one can be inert - as you claim banking is - and still be the most profitable industry in the world, well, I can bet that all other industries in the world will want to be like banks. That'd be the height of "work-life" balance, to put it mildly!

@AlexKreger:

I've been marketing and selling technology to the BFSI industry for nearly 3 decades. Then and now, banking contributes more revenues to IT services industry than any other industry. If there's one industry that understands how technology changes financial services and adapts to it, it's BFSI.

Blockbuster, Kodak and Nokia were all individual companies. Banking is an industry. No point in comparing them. You tell me one industry that was destroyed by technology and I'll tell you why that won't happen to banking for the forseeable future.

Despite all the UX issues in banking systems,

1. Financial services remains the most profitable sector in FORTUNE 500 (https://twitter.com/s_ketharaman/status/751030776981053441).
2. 3 out of 5 most profitable US companies are in Financials sector (https://twitter.com/s_ketharaman/status/751030776981053441).
3. Despite GFC, Legacy & Fintech, 7 out of 10 most profitable companies in the world are in financial services. (https://twitter.com/s_ketharaman/status/766205700225785857)
4. Closer to myself, I recently complained to my Relationship Manager that systems of his bank - a Top 3 private sector bank in India - have one of the worst UX of any bank. He turned around and told me that his bank has a higher market cap than global giants like Deutsche Bank, Barclays Bank, etc.

All this makes me question the role of UX in banking. Nokia was felled by an Apple. There's no Apple-equivalent for traditional banks in the horizon.