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A quick glance at the "Related Stories" section below confirmed my impression that this kind of idea crowdsourcing portal is at least 2 years old. I longer have any banking relationship with Barclays but, if its microsite still allows me to contribute my $0.02, my first idea would be for it to speeden up initiatives like these.

As highlighted in this Q&A, the Gulf Region pioneered POBO and many other treasury best practices decades ago. It's indeed fitting that SIBOS must finally happen in Dubai. 

With US$ 200B in profits, financial services is the most profitable industry in the latest FORTUNE 500 list. Surely they must be doing something right and we must concede that the 85% of IT spent on keeping the machine running is money well spent? Besides, a lot of S-M-A-C is available on SaaS with little or no CAPEX, so even the residual 15% of their IT budget should easily enable banks to transform themselves and adapt cutting edge technology - should they feel the need to. I've hearing about Apple and Google for years but I still haven't been able to figure out how they - or any of the other tech companies - can "redefine the way banking products and services are designed, delivered and experienced by customers". 

@AlexanderP:

TY for your comment. In general, I agree with you that it's quite difficult to get smartphone GPS work while indoors. However, anecdotally, my experience with iPhone has been different: (i) Several years ago, I've personally seen the GPS of an old iPhone 3G model work fine indoors. Therefore, I tend to believe that Passbook - which was launched on GPS in the more recent iPhone 4 / iOS 5 era - would work "as advertised" (ii) US-based friends and relatives report widespread use of Apple Passbook in American malls and airports in the last 12 months.

I just noticed that the page reached by clicking my Apple Passbook hyperlink has changed drastically since I last saw it a few days ago, probably after the recent launch of iOS 7. The new page makes only a passing mention of Passbook. When I Googled for "Apple Passbook", I reached this article, according to which "Passbook adds iBeacon support (in iOS 7)". This could very well take Passbook's location sensitivity to the next level, as you've suggested. Incidentally, the same story also says, "consumers have made it clear that the future of mobile wallets does not lie in the payments, but rather in the non-payment aspects of your wallet." Looks like I'm not alone!

I agree that a single interaction for both loyalty and payment will enhance UX. However, that presupposes a mobile loyalty-cum-payment program, which seems to involve a very big leap in business model. Many years after Starbucks Card was launched and has reportedly became a hit, I don't know any joint programs like that, neither on plastic nor mobile, not even from the "usual suspects" like PAYBACK or NECTAR.

With 2FA, Mobile OTP, Chip+PIN and the like, RBI seemed to have restricted its killjoy tendencies to ePayments. With this latest move, it has proved that they extend to cash as well!

This resonates well with the concluding remark of my blog post titled "Jumping On The Omnichannel Bandwagon" published almost two years ago: 

"We believe that 100% multichannel support ... is neither necessary nor practical".

Since the PIN supplied by Zapp will only work on one mobile phone, Zapp is already 2FA.

Boku, Zong and many other Gen Y Mobile Payments (GYMPs) operate on a similar basis. However, they restrict themselves to online payments, for which usage scenario they definitely deliver a superior UX compared to entering 40-50 keystrokes of credit card info and getting shunted around to VbV website, and so on. But, for in-store usage, this seems like a solution seeking a problem from the consumer adoption perspective.

Very soon, most people will be so enamored by the fingerprint scanner on the latest iPhone that they'll shift all their transactions to iTunes. Online banking and shopping will cease to matter.

Passbook is a clear enough signal that Apple has chosen to fix what's really broken, namely plastic loyalty cards, and ignore payments, where plastic is not broken.

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