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Lower fees is a powerful value proposition for merchants with Dwolla. Not sure what Dwolla offers for payers, though. I'm assuming that Dwolla doesn't offer deferred payment and reward points, two major attractions to payers of credit cards.

Mobile banking and payments have been around for years. Despite that, a large portion of customers involved in your research don't seem to want to use them. Whose court is the ball in? If customers', it might make more sense for banks to jettisson any further work around the mobile channel instead of fighting the losing battle of using it "to create a competitive advantage". If banks', can you offer any specific list of enhancements in the mobile channel that would result in greater customer adoption of the channel? Certainly, it can't be to provide a seamless online banking experience: Technically, mobile is a different channel than online, so "online banking experience" on a mobile is a logical fallacy. Besides, as I'd highlighted in my 3-part blog post titled Jumping On The Omnichannel Bandwagon over a year ago, seamless multichannel banking experience is neither required nor feasible. This recent Snarketing2.0 post substantiates my views.

Personally, I believe that banks can pump up mobile channel adoption rate by launching "Mobile 3.0" features - e.g. turn-by-turn navigation for ATM / Branches, Mobile RDC, and so on - by exploiting GPS, camera, voice recorder and other smartphone specs.  GoBank and a couple of other banks have already done this. Since PCs lack these specs, online banking will not be able to support these features, thus making the customer experience across multiple channels the opposite of seamless. In other words, a "seamy" customer experience will actually boost mobile channel usage. 

@AlexW: TY for your clarification. However, I can only talk of banks where such scripts do exist and were developed by one of my past employers. I do recognize that they don't feature in the list of banks - BNP Paribas, Commerzbank, etc. - involved in this initiative. Talking of which, since the article states, "trading flows in electronic markets have been automated", it's likely that this initiative itself has little to do with internal systems - such as the aforementioned scripts intended for internal use - but for automating customer-facing "processes for enabling clients" that "have remained highly manual".

Detailed article. According to anecdotal evidence, a lot of the nouveaux riche crave for societal recognition. If your research supports this, private banks and wealth management SBUs could deepen their engagement with this segment of customers by providing them with opportunities to speak during public events and otherwise fulfill their higher levels of needs and wants in the Maslow's inverted pyramid. 

Online password managers that do exactly this have been around for ages but no one can be faulted for being in the dark about them since they - i.e. online password managers - have never managed to achieve mainstream adoption in all this time. As I'd pointed out here, foreign language passwords or bank-provided eLockers might be a couple of solutions that meet the CSFs of usability, scalability, etc.

First time I remember reading an article about this obscure, but very valuable, product offered by bank branches. While on this subject, an interesting nugget: SDLs offered by independent nonbanking companies are frozen if the company declares bankruptcy. Apparently, while the content of the lockers don't belong to the company, the locker itself does, hence customers are locked out off their valuables under such a circumstance. Yet another reason why SDLs make a lot of sense for banks.

A midsize private sector bank in India has recently launched a mobile banking app that can display account balance - and forex rates and a few other pieces of information - without logon. It has left the decision on whether balance should be displayed with or without password to the customer. Very smart move, IMO. Interestingly, although the bank's core banking vendor has a mobile banking solution, the bank chose to go with a pure-play mobile banking vendor. Apparently, the bank's decision was influenced largely by the latter's greater sensitivity to customer preferences and its ability to come up with a suitable architecture that achieved the required tradeoff between convenience and security.

@AlexP:

You abandoned the transaction at exactly the right point. I went through a similar experience in a slightly different context. As I'd highlighted in my personal blog post The Everlasting One Minute written at the time, you'd likely have been asked to submit your original - repeat, original - passport for verification as the next step and, that too, by snail mail. I'd abandoned my transaction at this stage.  

While more details can be found in the two hyperlinked blog posts, a couple of learnings from India's CTS2010 program are:

• Better branding of the program
• Treating payers as defaulters when their old non-CTS2010 compliant cheques bounce (unless they can prove that they've replaced their old cheques with new CTS2010-compliant ones) 
• Not slapping "cheque return" fees on payees under such circumstances. 

While on this topic, the date of cutover to CTS2010 in India has been postponed twice. The current deadline is 31 July 2013. I'm still continuing to watch this space. 

Concerns around cloud are a secondary issue: In a study we recently conducted, we found that cumulative cloud subscription fees exceed onpremise license fees after 36-48 months even after accounting for 20% per year AMC for onpremise software. Considering that onpremise license fees cover the entire lifetime of the software, which could be 8-10 years, cloud makes business sense only for banks and other businesses that can't afford the capex associated with onpremise software. For larger companies that can, the business case for cloud / SaaS is highly questionable. This is even before taking into account SLA, integration, security and other attributes on which onpremise scores ahead of cloud. IMHO, in midsize to large banks and enterprises, cloud will be restricted to "white space apps" for the foreseeable future.