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I'm all for "socializing" with my bank provided there's value and must have been one of the earliest adopters of ICICI Bank's FB app. I just wish the access rights requested by banks (and other third parties) are a little less broadbased and obfuscatory: If I want to use FB Connect to log on to a website - to sidestep the need for "yet another username and password" - I don't know why I have to grant the website permission to "read your posts" or "post as you". Like you, I've heard many people say that they've rarely, if ever, clicked on a Google Ad. Yet Google AdWords delivers 94% of Google's revenues and 98% of its profits. So, it must be working for some one!

According to personal experience and anecdotal evidence, customers are bound to want to access their bank accounts from a variety of "devices" including branch, but not necessarily to do the same thing. In my view, different channels have different strengths (e.g. branch is great for handling documentation) and different banking needs have different frequencies (e.g. no one really wants to open a fixed deposit every day but every one might want to check their account balances every day, especially in outer space after having paid big bucks to Virgin Galactic to get there!), so omnichannel - rather than multichannel - banking might strike the right balance between cost and benefit for a bank. Definitions and examples for omnichannel and multichannel can be found in the three part blog post titled Jumping On The Omnichannel Bandwagon (hyperlink removed) on my company blog.

My experience - described in my personal blog post titled Why B2B Suppliers Should Accept Credit Cards (hyperlink removed) - endorses your finding. But, that was two years ago. With BitCoin looking like a viable alternative, especially for cross-border transactions, I'm beginning to have second thoughts.

By the standards of mobile wallets, Starbucks' is no doubt a huge hit in the USA. But, unless my calculation (ow.ly/lNKVk) misses something, only 1 out of 25 Starbucks customers uses its mobile app to make payments. Does that make it a "huge success"?

Wonder if the Chatham House Rule is slowly taking root in Finextra :) Anyway, the debate has shifted to the cost-benefit / risk-return proposition of mobile / NFC / contactless payments. To return to the M&S scenario, I doubt if it matters to a man on the street whether the POS software is correctly written or not - in the opinion of an anonymous Finextra member or anyone else. IMHO, what counts is that a reputed company like M&S has certified the POS for use at its store. When such a POS could potentially cause a problem - of exactly the nature I'd described in my comment here - switching to another retailer is overreacting. Turning wary of contactless is sensible.

Sorry, fixed the above hyperlink. It's ow.ly/lNKVk

@EricS: Spot on +1. In all this hype about technology, many of us - including me - tend to forget what really matters. According to my calculations, 24 out of 25 Starbucks customers don't use its mobile wallet for making payments. Surely, Starbucks still can't make espressos fast enough?!

@Anon:

Since I've outed my location, I guess I invite comments like "Anyone who has ever used Contactless cards in the UK market knows this is utter rubbish". But, since posting anonymously is never my cup of tea, I have to respond to such comments: I've used both closed- and open-loop contactless cards in UK back in 2007-2008, the former at a Starbucks cafe inside the premises of a Top 5 UK Bank and the latter at a Krispy-Kreme store, both in Canary Wharf. (I did say here that "I was a very early adopter of contactless cards"). 

With that out of the way, my point is not about how people use contactless cards - even without using contactless cards in UK, I don't expect anyone to claim that they'll wave a contactless card from two feet away to make a payment. The crux of my blog post and comment is  how contactless cards could get used unwittingly in the system. For example, I've reached the till. I've two contactless cards A and B. I wish to use Card A to make the payment, take it out of my wallet and hand it over at the POS. All this while, Card B is still inside my wallet, which is two feet away from the POS. Based on my experience with RFID technology, I'll not be surprised if Card B is inadvertently charged despite being two feet away. I'll also not be shocked if, in addition, Card A is also charged as intended. Hence, double-dipping. This is the clear and present danger with this technology. This is how I see the average man on the street perceiving it. It hardly matters how much counterevidence is produced by the payments specialist to say that this can never happen.  

@Anon:

NFC and contactless are based on RFID communication standards, as @AlexanderP had pointed out above:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_field_communication

In fact, in another Finextra post on which I'd commented, the author wrote: "Contactless cards... work by using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology".

Maybe if you'd read the previous comments to this blog post and the other post, you'd have reconsidered your comment. Not sure where you read my wild and inaccurate claim.

According to this FORTUNE article, UnitedHealth has created a brand new business around data that generates over US$ 30B in annual revenues within 10 years of inception. While this is in insurance, it illustrates the huge potential of data / analytics in an equally data-intensive industry like banking.