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Personally, I appreciate my bank's efforts at upselling and cross-selling - after all, I'll feel bad if my bank introduced new products and services and never bothered to communicate them to me.

However, I've realized that many people seemingly don't and have read about complaints giving examples of thoughtless and irrelevant offers they've received from banks.

To put things in perspective, it might help if readers can highlight a few concrete examples of what they believe their banks can do to help them and a majority of their customer base without selling additional products / services. I've really not come across any such examples of what people think banks can do right.

Although bulk discounts for frequent users is a good example, I'm not sure if this benefit would apply to the broad base of banking customers since many basic banking services are free anyway in many countries. 

I learned from a recent experience as a supplier that, even in the B2B world, there are certain payments that are small enough to be authorized by VP-level of people in the customer organization. Such payments can be made in minutes by VPs using their credit cards and then claimed back from their company via their standard claims reimbursement process.

This experience exposed "frictionless payment initiation" as one more reason why suppliers should consider accepting credit card payments, especially for cross-border transactions. In fact, in such situations, acceptance of credit card boosts the chance of the sale happening in the first place. 

On the other hand, when I wasn't able to accept credit card payments due to issues being faced by PayPal in India, the following alternatives proved to be extremely painful and almost killed the sale:

1. EFT. According to their company policy, only the Group Chairman of the customer organization was authorized to initiate EFTs. When this person could finally find the time for this activity amid his busy schedule, they discovered that their bank - a local community bank in Illinois, USA - apparently lacked knowledge of terms like BIC involved in cross-border payments and hence had to regret inability to process such a transaction.    
2. Western Union / MoneyGram. Could be used to make payments only to me as an individual, not to my company. So, this option was also ruled out. 
3. Cheque. While this was the option that worked eventually, it took 35 days to sight good funds in my company's bank account, not to mention that it attracted some fees.

While my experience possibly pertains only to a small percentage of B2B payment types, it does illustrate the merits of accepting credit card payments in such niches.

Amazon DE seems to support Direct Debit payments. 

Bezahlung per Bankeinzug >>> Payment by direct debit

http://www.amazon.de/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=504928.

@John: Retail and corporate banking customers in the UK pay hefty fees for CHAPS realtime transfers. Likewise, in the USA, they pay a few dollars fees for Expedited Payments, which is only same-day. Given that CHAPS and Expedited Payments simply transfer funds faster, it is not far-fetched to expect people to pay for FPS, which has a theoretical SLA of 2 hours but often executes the transfer nearly in realtime.  

A couple of years ago, another leading bank was planning to launch a product for realtime cross-border incoming remittances into the UK. While paucity of space does not permit me to get into full details of this product, suffice to say that it was going to use FPS for the UK leg of the transaction, and that it had a far greater value proposition as compared to Western Union / MoneyGram transfers that cost more and take hours. I haven't heard much about this product in recent times, though.

@Nick: While I agree with your point about unfairness, banks might not always be responsible for the FPS non-reachability problem, which occurs at the level of sort code of the specific account.   

Just before FPS go live, I remember a large UK TELCO requesting a Big 5 UK Bank - one of the FPS leaders - NOT to enable the sort code of its collection account with this bank for FPS. From what we heard, it wasn't as though the TELCO didn't want to enjoy its money earlier but realtime receipt would have apparently wrecked havoc on its collections process because its legacy 'sweeping' software was programmed to start checking for receipt status only 3 days past the date of payment initiation. As a result, customers of the TELCO were forced to initiate their payments 3-4 days before their bill due date, like in the pre-FPS days, although the bank in question was not a laggard. 

Props to Andy for making this excellent observation.  

In my very early stages of involvement with FPS at a Top 5 UK Bank, I'd wondered why the bank hadn't thought of a product around FPS. I was told that implementing FPS was fraught with several challenges, so the bank would like to focus on completing the implementation first instead of frittering away its energies in marketing it. At the time (around Feb. 2007), this seemed a sensible, if conservative, approach.

However, now that we're approaching the third anniversary of successful launch of FPS in May 2008, the lack of a market-facing product around FPS does seem like a great opportunity missed. Not only can such a product be a rich source of additional revenues but, if packaged appropriately, it could also deliver tremendous competitive advantage to those banks who have spent millions to implement FPS completely.

Agreed that people can post anonymously or with fictitious names but firms only have to worry about situations where the regulator links objectionable posts to the firms, which can only happen when the said content is posted by employees using their real names. Tools like HEATMAP360 - and I'm sure Sungard's Protegent Social Media Surveillance - can surely prove effective to firms within this domain. 

If it applies to its employees using their personal computers, social media account and Internet connections during their off-working hours, then CBA's social media policy does seem draconian. However, if it only applies for use of official infrastructure during business hours, it's only fair that CBA should protect its own interests. 

Although there are standard formats like QIF for retail banking statements, what seems lacking is a way by which the user can allow the PFM application to ONLY download statements from the Internet Banking portal but block everything else. 

Under the circumstance, the user has two options: (1) Share her Internet Banking credentials with the PFM, which effectively gives a carte blanche to the PFM - and their partners and potential hackers - to help themselves to all features in her Internet Banking portal (2) Avoid sharing account credentials with the PFM, instead download the statements by visiting the Internet Banking portal herself, then upload the statements to the PFM website.

Option 1 is supported by almost all PFMs but allaying users' security concerns is not easy. Apart from KUBLAX, the UK PFM which downed its shutters sometime ago, I haven't come across any other PFM supporting Option 2, which probably suggests that B2C statement formats are far from being common knowledge. But, as I'd pointed out in this post, Option 2 poses tremendous friction and undermines the value proposition of PFM for many users.  

http://sketharaman.com/blog/2009/03/02/personal-finance-services-walk-the-tightrope-between-convenience-and-security/

This seems to be a major hurdle in the way of mass adoption of non-bank providers of PFM.       

FiServ's ZashPay allows a payer to direct her bank to send money by only quoting the payee's mobile phone number. 

http://sketharaman.com/blog/2010/05/12/fiserv-zashpay-should-gain-rapid-consumer-acceptance/

As far as I know, ZashPay is only available via the bank's Internet Banking portal. While extending it to the mobile channel will face the usual challenges related to security and ROI, it should work on the back of whatever repository of mobile phone numbers that already exists today.