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To excel banks have CIOs now :) Chief innovation officer .Atom was in news for that.

Approximately 4000 fintech startups are active with a dozen of them being valued at over $1 billion .Most being tiny though they are growing fast. Lending Club, the biggest fintech lender, has arranged $9 billion of loans since launching in 2007 compared to $885 billion of credit-card debt in America alone. While fintech groups do business in the billions Banks deal in trillions. Few in Silicon Valley or Silicon Roundabout want to take on that heavily regulated bit of finance. Many admit they depend on the Bank. After all, you need a bank account to use most fintech services.

Bank can buy such Fintech or Partner . Technology innovation not being so core to banking Banks always have the option of -Incubating Fintechs

@Ketharaman ... Great that it has percolated down to operational level .The e KYC is getting cascaded to mobile as well where you can have your mobile activated in few minutes . 

SBI is already there ..........Under the e-KYC facility, e-KYC certificate is generated as an identity document. Fingerprints of the customer are captured and sent to UIDAI for authentication of identity and address proof. On successful verification from UIDAI, the e-KYC service will respond to display demographic details. 

Yes Hugo ...Its indeed a very interesting aspect i.e openess to collaboration.In India the regulator has called for payment bank licence which is in lines with the point you have made .

Thanks Charmaine for adding few more valueable and interesting facts . Certainly the potential is enormous with 85% of transaction globally being in cash.

Indeed a very informative and balanced piece remaining to the confines of payments.Certainly a break from the noise made all around - Banks are doomed , Banks are going to be the slave of Facebook,Google etc.Good one

AS banks have been and  going to reallign the focus has been shifting from branch and will continue to do so from brick and mortar branch to a omnibus channel or SMAC Stack .While Banks are leveraging technology to do so the popular perception as opposed to fact is that is that Banks are victim of digital boom.

The report says that ‘Technology, and in particular mobile money, is seen to play a pivotal role in expanding access to banking services’ .The biggest gains can be seen in Sub-Saharan Africa, where on average more than 10% of adults report having a mobile money account.

If such is the case the potential for a drastic reduction of unbanked populace can be gauged from the  fact that India has opened  115 million bank accounts of which about  80 million having no money in them towards the end of 2014.Further one in every 300 Indian(compared to 76% in Kenya) uses mobile payment and of every 9  out of 10 transaction are paid in cash and coins. India is grabbing the opportunity by calling for and having received application for ‘payments bank’. India’s’ largest bank with over 17K branches and asset size over $ 400b is in the fray. So also an ‘ outsourcing company’.

1986 is actually too ancient in the evolution of banking chennels .A lot of water has flowed down the Thames as banks have strongly moved to alternative channels.Hence its natural for ATMs to grow.Vis-a-Viv year 2003 , a 58 % increase is quite explainable as M3 money supply in the UK has more than doubled( about 130 %).so now the question is cash a lesser king? Unidimensional statistics can be misleading.