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Yes would be my short answer to your provocative question! 

I happened to have the chance to get involved closely with UK Faster Payments when I was leading an FPS vendor consortium at a Top 5 UK bank. Need for regulatory compliance not only ensured adequate funding for the Faster Payments program itself, but also presented the opportunity to upgrade the entire payments landscape much of which was un-touched by modern technology since the late '80s.

Having observed many corporates' specific information needs from their banks around payments, remittance and reconciliations, I agree with George that transaction data is a goldmine waiting to be monetised.

At the same time, having witnessed typical responses from banks' transaction banking leadership to demands for such information from their corporate customers, I'm led to believe that there's a strong need to educate banks on how to use the incremental fee income from providing greater transparency with the perceived loss of float income that would accompany any reduction in opacity that such a measure would cause. 

As often is the case, the devil is in the details.

With their realtime, bite-sized, anywhere-access features, I personally find SMS alerts to be most effective in keeping a track of transactions in my bank accounts. To avoid drowning under too many SMS messages, I find the ability to set a threshold useful, so that only transactions exceeding that figure will trigger an alert.

John: You might want to watch out for "dormant charges", which some banks have started charging cardholders, especially of prepaid cards, for prolonged NON-usage of their cards!

One more barrier to adoption of credit card usage, especially in emerging countries, is the notion that it leads to overspending. While many people - including me! - will agree with this notion based on their personal experience, it's also a fact that, thanks to services like Offermatic, people can actually save money by using credit cards. Boosting credit card usage probably needs a two-pronged approach from banks and card networks in which they not only provide incentives but also buttress any apprehensions about overspending.

DBS Singapore, ANZ, Barclays, again ANZ - these are just the well-publicized cases of ATM / POS outages in the last few months. While fault-tolerant technologies already exist and can possibly prevent such outages, it appears that banks are finding it hard to justify their 1.5-2X costs in relation to more traditional technologies. The situation is rife for technology providers to innovate and create models that can be used to calculate and demonstrate to banks the $ value of the cost of such outages in terms of lost revenue, service costs and reputation loss.

BofA and Wells Fargo are a couple of banks that provide fairly comprehensive P2FM/PFM capabilities on their own websites. However, the insight consumers can gain from them is restricted to their account(s) in the respective bank. This is obviously not too useful given that a person's total financial position and his or her ability to control it is clearly a function of all their accounts - checking, savings, credit card, etc. - across multiple financial institutions. Besides, single bank PFMs are likely to push only their own products, thus making them a biased source of budgeting recommendations.

Cross-account aggregation and unbiased offers are two benefits provided by neutral, non-bank PFMs, and it's difficult to image how banks can match up with them here. 

Even if a single bank PFM seeks to provide cross-account aggregation, like HDFC in India does with its "OneView" service, consumers have to disclose Internet Banking credentials of the accounts they hold with other banks to the PFM-providing bank. But, this seems only slightly less skittish than doing so with neutral PFMs.

Surely, we don't expect one bank to promote another bank's product, so the benefit of unbiased offers is virtually impossible to get from a single bank PFM solution.

In PFM, we see an interesting tradeoff between trust and functionality. This might get resolved only by being more pragmatic about the expectations from a PFM (e.g. visibility versus budgeting) or by the entry of a bank-like trusted entity (e.g. retailer? telco?) into the role of a PFM provider.  

While I don't underestimate the challenges involved in sanctions screening, especially those related to non-English names, what I've seen and heard does lead me to believe that it is possible for banks to surmount them by using currently-available technologies.

(a) The payments landscape in a large UK bank comprises of 4-5 applications, some of which are modern and can accurately process names and addresses containing acute, grav, umlaut and other accents used in European languages, whereas others are legacy and simplistically skip such accent marks. If only the legacy apps were upgraded, the whole payments shop would derive the ability to overcome language-related challenges

(b) Algo trading applications arguably handle far more dynamic data (e.g. stock price data that change far more frequently than whitelists and blacklists used in sanctions screening) yet operate at far lower latency (e.g. milliseconds) as compared to most payments applications. By adopting memory-resident databases and other technologies used in algo trading, payments applications would be more capable of responding to dynamic data.   

Virtually all consumer use of credit card happens after the purchase. In restaurant, gas station, and many other cases, the credit card is presented to the merchant after the consumption - not just after the purchase. In such cases, it would be interesting to observe the proceedings at the point of payment if inControl declines the transaction citing, for example, "you have breached your 'eating out' budget for the month"!  

As marketers shift their attention to creating increasingly fine-grained offerings that are targeted at an 'audience of one', their taste for personally-identifiable - as against aggregate - information will only grow. Kudos to the author for highlighting the possibility that is likely to grow in importance. 

Google has built up a hugely lucrative business around selling AdWords ads to its huge search audience who get it free today. I'm not sure if it would be in Google's best business interests by starting to charge for search in return for sharing surfing habits with partners, for such a move carries the huge risk of killing the golden goose by triggering a massive exodus of Google search users to other free search engines. If that happens, its AdWords revenues would take a plunge.