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This just out: "Don't Expect To Pay With Your Smartphone At The Mall This Holiday Season: ...Consumers seem unconvinced that mobile payments are worth the hassle... The bottom line: The much-talked-about mobile payments revolution in nowhere in sight."

@AndrewS: You've raised a very valid point about number of apps versus richness of each app. We happened to undertake a similar exercise as the one you've recommended in the last line of your comment. Technically, the results were not conclusive. However, from a business point-of-view, they signaled a clear preference for more # of apps with fewer features per app. I've written up our findings in the following blog post on my company blog: SaaS Will Change The Outcome Of The Bloatware Versus Light Apps Debate (hyperlink removed per Finextra Community Rules but this post should come up on top of Google Search results).

RE-KYC, request for change of postal / email address and release of dormant accounts are examples of new tasks that are regularly entering the banking milieu of late. Much as customers might want to carry out such tasks remotely, they seem to require branch visits universally. As highlighted in this Q&A, bankers have started visiting customers at home or office to collect documents for new account opening, mortgage application, etc. If tellers can be retrained to handle "compliance" and "omnichannel" activities like these, they won't become an endangered species, even if volumes of their traditional tasks decline. 

With a humble plea to avoid shooting the messenger, let me slip in my "sorry to say but I told you so":

Mobile Wallets: Fix What's Broken - And It Ain't Payments

That said, mobile payments come in apps, QR codes, and other flavors apart from NFC, so it's misleading to treat NFC and mobile payments as Siamese twins. 

Great post! I've always scoffed at claims that banks have to seek Apple's permission to be available on iPhones and iPads. I only recently learned about enterprise app stores and agree with you that this is "Contrary to what many people believe"!

Structured financial products that stoked investor greed, rating agencies that gave AAA ratings to such products, and, most importantly, the ability to privatize their gains and socialize their losses - when there are these and other lower hanging fruits available to explain what happened, I'm intrigued by how you blame legacy systems for the collapse of banks. In any case, if these legacy systems were too weak to spot the risks in various products, how come they were strong enough to help create these risky products in the first place? I have a very different take on why banks continue to use their legacy systems and it resonates well with the views expressed by @FinextraM and @MarkP:

6 Reasons Why Banks Can't Transform Legacy Applications  

Haven't we had enough IT meltdowns in the past to find out how many customers actually left their banks over the last meltdown? 

Cash has historically been the retail payment method of first resort. When cards stop working on a day like Cyber Monday, cash suddenly becomes the MOP of last resort. 

"Putting right customers left out of pocket" - not sure if I even understand that statement - is all fine but what about businesses who failed to make the sale because customers' cards failed and they didn't carry cash? Does RBS have any plans to make up their lost revenues? Thankfully in India, cash is welcome online and even e-ticketing is offered via "cash on delivery" payment mode.

The Death Of Cash Is At Least 190 Years Away 

The biggest problem with electronic payments is their utter unpredictability amidst multiple points of failure: You go to an MNO to pay your mobile phone bill and their telephone line is dead; you go to a store to buy something, their POS machine is down; you go online, your mobile network coverage is poor, so you never receive the Mobile OTP required to complete the card payment. I could go on and on - notice that I haven't even covered the RBS-type of failure with backend systems - but you get my drift. Of late, I've refused to get frustrated with ePayments and have gone back to cash. Reminds me of the days over 25 years ago before I got my first credit card in the late '80s.

Ever since I wrote The Death Of Cash Is At Least 190 Years Away, I've seen the "Zero Cash Day" getting pushed out farther and farther. Although I kicked off a lively debate with this post, I got a bit bored with this subject myself and have stopped writing / commenting about it of late. However, I must acknowledge that your article makes a fundamental and valid point about cash and civil liberty that is completely ignored by the digerati that's pushing for a cashless society. I remember myself mentioning somewhere during this debate that, of all the payment methods in the world today, cash is the only truly legal tender. With every other MOP, each party involved in the transaction flow can shift the blame to someone else when something goes wrong, leaving the consumer / payer in the lurch.