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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. 

I recall occasions when I've visited branches of a couple of UK high-street banks (not Barclays) because I wanted the advantages of a high-touch branch environment to put through cross-border fund transfer and other tricky transactions. However, after standing in a long queue, when my turn would come, the bank staffer would tell me to use Internet Banking or Phone Banking without exhibiting the slightest sensitivity to why I was there in the first place.

Quite frankly, with such practices, banks alienated customers visiting branches and undermined the potential of their own branch network for doing cross-selling and upselling.

By sacking financial advisors from branches, while banks can undoubtedly save costs, I strongly doubt if they can retain or grow their revenues. Spurned by the branch, customers who are only comfortable in a physical location are likely to head to the nearest Western Union or MoneyGram outlet. Whereas, customers who don't mind the online channel will find the websites of Xoom and other non-bank remittance providers to be superior destinations compared to Internet Banking portals of their own banks which are so full of friction and suffer from inferior usability. 

For the past 72 hours, my attempts at making salary payments to my employees via electronic fund transfer have failed due to the slow/non-functioning Internet Banking portal of my bank in India. With this experience, I can imagine how disconcerting this downtime must be to NAB's customers, and can't help thinking how easy it would've been to simply write cheques instead.

I agree with Neil R that banks need to exercise a much more rigorous governance on their IT systems. I doubt if we'll see much improvement in that space if banks think of their customers as captive. A sea change can be expected only if they find out how many new customers they lost when interested website visitors couldn't open new accounts or apply for mortgages because the related functionality had failed alongside other online banking tasks carried out by existing customers viz. view account balance, download statements, pay bills, etc. 

Even if it's one app at the level of a loyalty network - a la Nectar in the UK or T-Punkte / PAYBACK in Germany - I see some chance of this taking off selectively.

But, in its current form where it needs one separate app for each retailer, I think mass adoption is far away, if it ever happens.

Moving on to more open forms of NFC mobile payments, most current implementations merely replace the plastic form factor of the credit card by NFC. The credit card account, merchant fees, interchange, issuer bank - all of them continue to play their usual role in the payment transaction.

IMHO, NFC mobile payments can cause true disruption only if it changes the traditional four-corner retail payments model and offers concrete monetary benefits to one or more participants ex: lower merchant fees. Judging by that criteria, I see far greater potential for mass adoption for somebody like BlingNation, even if it's closed-loop.

@Antti:

You select BML as the payment method on Amazon checkout page, visit BML's website, complete a short form, return automatically to Amazon checkout page with an approval (75% probability), Amazon confirms your payment and readies your goods for shipment. All this happens in around 45 seconds.

I'm not sure if I understand your comment correctly, but the above illustration clearly establishes that BML is as much an online payment method as a credit card. 

Gareth:

I agree with your root cause analysis, namely, that "banks treat customers as captive". This assumption by banks has traditionally been true because closing down one bank account and opening another is not as simple as switching to another e-tailer. However, when constantly faced with problems, customers are increasingly choosing to do more business with other banks, thus lowering revenue per account for their primary banks. This is something I've pointed out in one of my blog posts:      

http://sketharaman.com/blog/2008/09/04/how-usability-can-increase-adoption-of-internet-banking/

With the likes of Forrester now weighing in on this subject, we might hopefully see some concreate improvements from banks around usability and friction of their Internet Banking applications.  

Amazon has been offering Bill Me Later (BML) as a standard payment method. While not positioned explicitly as an e-invoice, BML displays many attributes of one viz. deferred billing, consolidated billing, once a month payment just like electronic payment of utility bill, and so on.  BML has been a regular feature of Amazon USA for over 2-3 years although I'm not sure if it is offered outside the USA. 

The employees whose 12 working days are freed up are typically accounting staff who don't automatically qualify to work in a company's production / development / customer service functions. Even assuming that retraining helps some of them qualify for the transfer, it's only natural for the buyer of e-invoicing technology to weigh the savings squeezed out of 12 working days versus the additional cost of retraining.

Such analyses tend to cut both ways, thus presenting major challenges to positioning e-invoicing - or any other - technology using headcount reduction as the key benefit.