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Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Promoted Tweets illustrate how, "When the product is free, you are the product". It's only a matter of time before this maxim gains traction in banking, what with technology from Cardlytics and other vendors enabling banks to display targeted offers on their Internet Banking portals. By shifting many activities to self-service under NetBanking, banks are saving a lot in labor costs, which is another element of cost shift that banks are driving with Internet Banking. Just today, I spent more than an hour on my dime initiating an EFT on my bank's website when I could've written a cheque in under five minutes.

Yes. Yes. No.

Yes, SOA is a Band Aid.

Yes, SOA will entrench legacy systems. 

No, SOA is not a Band Aid on cancer. Legacy does not preclude innovation. While latest technology can't hurt, it's not a prerequisite for innovation, which can happen in many other forms viz. business model. As I've highlighted in Why Banks Can't Transform Legacy Applications - Part 2, banks have a decent track record with innovation with whatever panoply of systems they've been using. 

At the risk of sounding radical, customer service has no place in the collection / recovery process. Lenders have given enough help to borrowers with their debt solutions, they shouldn't have to give any more help with their debt revovery solutions. IMHO, regulators should stop putting so many restrictions on the collection / recovery process. End of the day, if a lender goes soft on recovering its outstandings, it'd be the taxpayer who'd have to foot the bill. And, as a taxpayer, I clearly don't want to do that, as I'd highlighted in my post Let Banks Chase Their Defaulters Instead Of Seeking Bailouts

I've lost track of the number of ERP implementations in other industries that begin with the grand plan to "change the fabric of the company" and end up with the core implementation team members patting one another on the back for accomplishing the "our invoices print fine" milestone on the go-live day. Banks are at least honest enough to admit that their goal is to first replicate their status quo with any new software product.

Despite not embracing the latest shining technology, banks spend more on IT than any other industry, as the balance sheet of many IT services companies would attest. Despite spending so much on IT, financial services is the most profitable sector in FORTUNE 500. Banks must be aware of some secret sauce of how to extract the maximum value from technology. As an aside, why's nobody talking about Windows Vista, which came in between XP and 7?

At the risk of using a morbid analogy, sticker on smartphone is like Band Aid on cancer - pointless. On another note, replacing something 60 years old with something else that's hardly trailblazing is innovative?

Maybe contactless cards were around earlier but my first exposure to using them for making payments was in 2007. Not sure whether it's good or bad that it has taken 7 years for this form factor to reach the current level of adoption. But, one thing is clear: This is yet another example that reinforces John M Keynes's famous saying, "The market can stay irrational for longer than the trader can stay solvent". 

One of my former employers used to position its technology as providing "unfair advantage" and splash this message in its ad campaigns. Will this line become illegal? Will we soon see storekeepers operating out of back alleys demanding that stores located on high streets be shut down?

While I don't have the figures, a lot more P2P and P2B transactions happen via cash / cheque / NetBanking than mobile banking today. PayM has the potential to convert a lot of that traffic to the mobile channel provided it was available directly to the users of these traditional channels. I noticed that Lloyds Bank is at least one bank that links PayM to NetBanking, not mobile banking. In fact, "You don’t need to register to send payments." according to its website. This makes a lot of sense since making PayM a part of the mobile banking app (e.g. PingIt) underutilizes its full potential.

@AlexP: When I clicked thru' the procedures for Barclays, HSBC and a couple of other banks, I got the impression that they wanted the customer to first download and install their own mobile banking app (e.g. PingIt) in order to link their account to PayM. That sounded a bit circuitous. But, if this can be done in a couple of seconds via NetBanking, if that's what you mean by "banking app", then it's indeed highly frictionless.