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You have to break a few eggs if you want to make an omlet but slow and steady wins the race. I don't know how far you can stretch these old sayings. On the one hand, KYC-Lite and other shortcuts could speed up the pace of financial inclusion. On the other hand, they could facilitate backdoor entry of money launderers and criminals into the formal banking system. That's a tradeoff that the public, government, regulator and banks are grappling with.

Some 20 years after the Internet came into existence and made realtime payments technically possible, American banks recently vetoed same day fund transfer. How many customers protested about this? How many banks went out of the game? How many others stepped in with an alternative offering? 

Customers might not care about "network bandwidth, infrastructure costs or technical complexities" but they can't help the fact that business models play an overarching role in determining whether a product / service is viable or not. If this is the state of affairs in the largest and one of the most consumerist, vibrant and entrepreneurial economies in the world, who can blame a typical business or bank for shrugging off doomsday predictions?

From personal experience, as long as there's free checking and minimum balances aren't too high, opening another account in another bank that offers a compelling feature comes more naturally than switching an existing account to the other bank. When I was in UK, my primary a/c was at HSBC. Transferring money via HSBC from UK to India would cost GBP 25 and take 3 working days. On the other hand, I could do it free-of-cost and in online / realtime from Citi UK. I simply opened another a/c in Citi UK and used FPS to transfer money from HSBC UK to Citi UK in near realtime and free-of-cost. Coming to think of it, I never even considered switching from HSBC to Citi. Unlike the cabbie, I did check F/X rates at both banks and found them to be in the same ballpark.

There's this prevailing view that T-Mobile doesn't need to differentiate its core product offering and can wing its new mobile money product based entirely on its powerful GTM differentiatiors like "45M existing customers, 70K stores and big mktg $$." 

https://twitter.com/JimMarous/status/426777247073067008

I can see where you're coming from. But, with an already conservative regulator and set of banks turning even more stringent about KYC after the recent CobraPost exposés, I fear that your words might be falling on deaf ears. Let alone first time KYC, there's something called RE-KYC, which is to repeat KYC every 2 years and it absolutely requires a branch visit.

Talking about mobile money, I'm afraid the situation on the ground is the exact opposite of what you envisage and what technology permits. While mobile money can be offered by MNOs, only a bank can do the KYC for new customer enrollment. As a result, it has actually become tougher to get a mobile money account than a bank account! I'm writing a post about this ridiculous situation but the spoiler alert is, even the M-PESA application of a Vodafone branch manager was rejected by the bank on KYC grounds!

That said, once you get past the initial account opening friction caused by KYC, it's a much smoother ride later (barring RE-KYC): No-frills account that must be offered to anyone who wants them, rare cases of account fees, savings account that are operationally the equivalent of checking accounts in the Western world, but earn 5% p.a. interest, and so on.

@MattW: As an ex-ASDA customer, I agree with your view!

On the other hand, according to FDIC figures quoted  by TheFinancialBrand.com in its article The Myth of Branch Decline, “Reversing three years of declines, the number of bank branches in the United States increased by more than 250 units in the 2013 FDIC reporting year." I don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong here. 

From personal experience with my own company's LBTR360 LBS app, my non-BLE experience is different: The app sends out an automatic push notification, with audio alarm, whenever the user reaches the location for which a task has been set up. Upon tapping the notification, the user is automatically taken to the app to take action. There's no need to take the phone from the pocket or to fire up the said app manually to check whether a task has come due. Of course, once the user hears the alarm that a task is due, they need to take out the phone from the pocket to act on it. But, that's part of the core functionality, not friction, and that's how it should be even with BLE. After all, what's the point in noticing a coupon for "25% off on Coke" when I've already left the supermarket after buying a pizza?

There's this view that T-Mobile doesn't need to differentiate its core product offering and can still gain traction based on GTM differentiatiors like "45M existing customers, 70K stores and big mktg $$.". 

https://twitter.com/JimMarous/status/426777247073067008

@AmitV: Kudos for a highly novel style of blogging that uses so much dialog. Hope this sets a new trend. Look forward to many more posts written in this style.