I’ll have contactless, please, with a side order of cash

"Why I've cut up my contactless bank card...and you should too," says Ross Clark - they are driving up prices and killing off cash. This Daily Mail article has been stirring up a lot of debate here in the UK. I won’t go through its contents in detail (you can find it here). But in a nutshell, Clark was sent a contactless debit card and he immediately cut it up with a pair of scissors because banks and credit card issuers are evil and cash is great.

A tad OTT, yes, and his argument contains numerous holes (without a debit card, how will you withdraw your beloved cash, Ross?) But I agree with him on one crucial point. The man and the woman in the street still like and trust physical money and distrust those who seek to do away with it. It’s unfair to write them off as luddites for this (as often happens within the tech industry).

Rising to the challengers

Challenger banks have been a black cloud looming over the “big four” for the past few years. The traditional High Street banks have been braced for these challengers to shake things up and create an entirely new environment, just as budget airlines did to the aviation industry in the nineties. And with the UK’s FCA keen to see consumers benefit from “effective competition” for regulated financial services, the time seems right.

While those working in the industry are tracking every move of the challengers and what they offer, this awareness has yet to filter down to customers. With the big four still holding over 90% of the UK market, and consumer awareness of challenger brands failing to gain momentum, is the impending shake-up going to happen, and if so, when?

The death of bank products has been greatly under-exaggerated

Source: Moven

Since 2005 I’ve been predicting the decline of branch banking. For almost ten years I fought bankers who decried my assessment that branches would cease to be the most important channel in banking, to be replaced by far more efficient mechanisms for revenue generation and relationship. Today the discussion is increasingly resorting to a sort of desperate plea — 'but branches aren't going to die completely, are they?' No one is saying branches will grow.

The UK, the US, Spain, and a host of other countries are seeing the lowest number of bank branches in decades. For the UK you’d have to go back 60 years to find lower numbers of bank branches than we have today, and 2014 saw the use of bank branches fall 6% in a single year — the biggest reduction ever. 

To branch or not to branch... is that the right question?

• The quest to justify banking's oldest distribution channel continues despite the wonders of self-service automated kiosks and the growing adoption of mobile banking. 
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• The arguments for and against branch banking are well publicised these days, and yet we continue to debate the subject year after year.

What does the future of the bank branch hold?

NCR video ATM ©NCR

Is the branch dead? On evidence of the RBR Branch Transformation event held in London, the answer is a resounding no. Banks from around Europe lined up to discuss how they are transforming their branch experience to meet the demands of the modern retail customer, and while the consensus is that branch networks are shrinking, the branch remains integral to customer acquisition and retention, as well as for generating product sales.

Payments Knowledge Forum: the inside track

@TFL

This year's Payments Knowledge Forum (PKF) in London kicked off with the theme that we are moving towards an ever more virtual world. David Smith, Wincor Nixdorf, opened the event with the statement that people are constantly on the move and expect their services to move effortlessly with them.

So how can the payments industry live up to this expectation?

Why are P2P payments slow on the uptake in the US?

© www.zafin.com

After speaking with Chris Burfield from FIS about the vendor’s recent person-to-person (P2P) payments project at US-based Everbank, a question arose: why are these types of services slow on the uptake in the US?

SAP Financial Services Forum: The inside track

This week’s SAP Financial Services Forum in London was a reminder of the supplier’s strengths and weaknesses in this sector. It was also a reminder of just how far SAP has moved in the last few years from its Walldorf and ERP centricity. In part through some major acquisitions, of course, it is now far more diverse and international than it was, with this also a key reason for almost ten per cent of its revenues now coming from the financial services sector.