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My company has had good experience with RhoMobile, another cross-platform mobile apps development environment. We developed a location based task reminder which makes heavy use of smartphone features like GPS, phonebook and mapping. We could generate Android and iPhone native apps from a single code base developed over RhoMobile without changing even a single line of code. RhoMobile also claims support for WP7 although we didn't get a chance to try it out. The future of RhoMobile is somewhat unclear though - it got acquired by Motorola Mobility, which itself got acquired by Google later. 

Westpac hopefully recognizes that Facebook Wall is a feed and not an inbox. Since comments anyway tend to fade away from the FB Wall in a few hours, Westpac shouldn't find any need to delete negative comments and attract such a PR backlash. In a couple of blog posts, I've raised a few concerns about another bank's FB behavior.

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=6187

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=6213 

At the same time, I don't envy FB administrators and digital marketers of banks and other businesses their responsibility to safeguard their brand on a platform that is outside their control. Do they have any recourse if and when impostors masquerading as bank customers keep bombarding their FB Walls with false comments? One likely solution: "Premium FB Company Pages", where a company pays for a fan page in return for greater control over what happens there (e.g. "ban" such impostors from posting on the Wall).

Is Australia singled out by the media or does this kind of thing happen only there? At the risk of exaggeration, will we soon see a news headline "All ATMs and POS systems in Australia work fine today"?

@Dirk K: 

Congrats!

Many such announcements end with "Android version coming soon". Should we make much out of the conspicuous absence of such a concluding line in yours?

Basic Demand-Supply curves can already provide the underpinnings of a platform that can simulate the effect of price of Product A on the performance of Product A. The real challenge is to come up with a platform that can simulate the effect of price of Product A on the entire portfolio of products A, B, C, etc. belonging to different SBUs of the bank. Even assuming that someone cracks the Holy Grail of relationship based pricing, they'd still have to surmount the walls of the silos in which banks are organized today and will likely be well into the future. What might really work is a rewards and recognition system that works at the level of the entire FI, not at SBU-level - that surely sounds like a pipedream already.

@Finextra Member:

Interesting point!

In the past, due to shortage of computing power or its exorbitant costs, scientists have reached "big conclusions" on the basis of small sample sizes that were often statistically insignificant. With growing computing power and falling costs, we've perhaps reached a stage now when we can actually analyze *all the data* and come to (a) "big conclusions" that are truly applicable for the entire population and / or (b) "micro conclusions" that are applicable for an audience of one or a handful of people. This might explain all the buzz around "big data" these days.  

I've heard of a leading bank in Canada doing the same thing a year ago, and have always wondered why American banks haven't followed suit or, for that matter, led the trend. Isn't it a part of standard bank account contracts that access credentials are confidential to the accountholder and cannot be handed over to third-parties? It should hardly matter that such third parties pass through all the info to Yodlee or protect them securely. The popularity of Mint, Offermatic and other services shows that, despite everything, there are enough people willing to throw caution to the winds if they stand to gain something in return. If consumer behavior in the context of PFMs is any indication, security concerns are grossly exaggerated and any steps to enhance security (e.g. 2FA) at the cost of increasing friction will stunt adoption of financial products.  

We can safely assume that smartphone users (a) have a bank account, and (b) are used to mobile apps. I'm unable to understand, then, why only 20% of them have accessed their bank accounts from their mobile phones. Is it because only 20% of banks offer mobile banking? Or, do we have to accept that 80% of smartphone users won't ever use mobile banking? Either way, it's difficult to reconcile this reality with claims of mobile banking being a great success. 

@MatP and @MattW:

Thank you for clarifying. This sheds more light into the exact nature of MPowa's offering. 

Plastic dongle based card readers for mobile phones have been around before Square. Their suppliers left it to the merchant to sign up directly for a merchant account with any acquirer bank. Square rightly recognized this to be a major pain area - to which I can attest from my personal experience. It disrupted the status quo by signing up for a merchant account in its own name and provided individual merchants with a sort of "sub-merchant-account" whereby the merchant does not have to sign up for a merchant account in its own name but can still accept card payments via Square's merchant account. And do this for a single uniform fee of 2.75% regardless of the acquiring bank, merchandise category, etc. 

Exclusion of merchant fees is a strong indication that MPowa is just another dongle provider and not a Square-equivalent at all. 

"...with mPowa taking 0.25% per transaction." Assuming this figure is not a typo - with the likes of Square charging 11X more at 2.75% - mPowa is a much cheaper option for merchants wishing to accept card payments.