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Good to see HSBC on Twitter. From personal experience of tweeting to various banks, HSBC was the last social media holdout.

"As the fee of the debit card transaction is fixed, the cashback does not cost the retailer anything extra" aka no extra fee for cashback part of the card transaction. That explains it. Ask the retailer to put through another transaction, solely for cashback, let's see how many retailers find handling cash costlier than the fee on the card transaction, and agree to give cashback.

The last time I checked, this article covers 2014, 2015 and 2020. That sounds like future to me. Denying the future just because it doesn't corroborate past predictions, has never been a good strategy.

It should be taught in schools that one should always listen to the views on something only from the people who are most affected by that something. As I'd highlighted in Cash in Hand Is Worth More Than Card In Bush, digital payments have a lot of hidden costs because of which, merchants, who are most affected by the purported costs of cash, rarely refuse cash.

If cashback is really meant to avoid the cost of processing cash, UK supermarkets should be happy give out any amount of cashback, shouldn't they - after all, "more the merrier" for them. Why, then, is there an upper ceiling on cashback of GBP 25 or some such small figure? Just asking.

I've helped create CPQ, CEM, DAM and many other CRM addon products, so I know how they help the salesperson. However my comment was targeted exclusively at CRM, not addons. Wonder if the SFDC guys know this but the key GTM theme for many of these addon product vendors is to go to existing CRM users and tell them, "sorry if you thought you'd get this functionality from your CRM, actually you need our addon product for that".

Well, if there are so many levels in the product management hierarchy and compliance requirements in your target market, that would surely help accelerate the pace of adoption of a product management software. Best wishes!

@ElizabethLumley: Okay, I didn't know about this new London Bridge station! New subgroup for "commute ranters" is a good idea. As long as you meant it on Quora / Facebook. But if you did mean Finextra, then well, with the kind of "robust language" I expect there, you might need to amend some of the Finextra Community Rules (that you probably were instrumental in making yourself in your previous avatar!).

@NickCollin: Totally agree. You should see the opposite of enthusiasm on the face of fintech when they realize they actually need to talk to that infra even to get account balances i.e. even for their first screen to work! I've had the experience!!

I once used to work in a multi-divisional conglomerate with diverse interests in IT, auto, consumer electronics, chemicals, and so on. All operating SBUs were very profitable. Despite that, the Treasurer made more profits for the company than all the SBUs put together. How? By deploying surplus cash from the operating SBUs in F/X trading and capturing profits from the spreads therefrom. Going by that experience, I'd think the most important decision for a Corporate Treasurer is: "In what asset class should I deploy surplus cash so that we maximize profit without endangering the enterprise's financial wellbeing?" I guess that comes closest to the #1 item on your list.

Oh, to introduce modern stuff like FPS, TARGET2, SEPA, Mobile Banking and so on, banks are already undertaking plenty of 'Scheduled and Emergency Engineering Work' on a regular basis. Just that they shield their customers from the ensuing downtime by (a) investing a lot of money on deploying clustering technologies with ACTIVE:ACTIVE servers and the like OR (b) by undertaking such work at, like, 3 o'clock in the middle of the night.

If we still have HSBC like incidents, it's because of UN'scheduled Emergency' reasons!

On another note, I always thought all that weekend rail downtime was caused by repairs of existing rails rather than on constructing new rails.

Better now? I just complained that my bank removed the "Favorite Transaction" feature on its ATM. When it was around during the past 2-3 years, it had cut down transaction times and resulted in shorter queues. Now, we're back to the earlier longer queues:(

As a sales, marketing and product management professional in B2B tech:

1. CRM has reached its current state of presence and revenues after having been around for over 20 years.
2. Besides, CRM never really helped sales people sell more / better. It gained traction because it helped CROs to keep a better track of whether their sales people were selling more / better.
3. The hierarchy in product is somewhat flat compared to sales. While the CPO title has started becoming visible of late, especially in startups, it's really just an upgrade of the product manager title. Ergo, product management software lacks the positioning hook that CRM enjoys.

That said, with the proliferation of product management software products in the recent past, we can expect greater adoption of this genre of technology in the next 10-15 years.