We have been here before so many times. The Coles banking and financial services vision is a veteran of corporate strategy and business reporting - an idea with immense prospects. The 2014 version of this strategy calls for a mobile wallet and the renewal - a little surprisingly - of a partnership with GE Capital. Keeping a grip on the Coles cards portfolio will have been a great driver of GE's recent approach to the renewal of a 20-year alliance, as cards are a cornerstone of its global offering.Coles earlier this year hired Karen Donaldson, a GE veteran, ahead of negotiations over the extension of the arrangement. Donaldson is general manager of loyalty and financial services marketing.She joined Spencer May, an executive hired from the UK late last year with a long cards pedigree at HSBC, Lloyds and Santander. He now heads Coles' "credit card solutions" business. Richard Wormald is general manager of financial services at Coles. He is a former Accenture consultant who worked on Flybuys in the late 2000s and fostered the growth of its insurance offering, a rare success.GE is, of course, ditching its main North American consumer finance interests. Maybe this will be a catalyst for change in a stale sector. Pooling capital with Bank of America at the time of foreign bank entry in the mid 1980s was the first real play in this niche by Coles. In the 1990s it invested in acquiring its own payments and switching those to banks in an act of great leadership, one it took Woolworths 20 years to follow. But no real follow-on around banking products ever emerged at Coles, as it tinkered with financial services plans (in cahoots with GE) and rolled out precious little. About the only good thing from this era was Coles as a steady voice during the refashioning of Eftpos into a competitive payments scheme. Other ideas - presumably buried within the Coles Group - failed to germinate. Buried within the Coles Group no actual banking vision has yet flowered into a real business.One possibility is that Coles will emerge with a sophisticated "digital banking" offering, with the firm subjected to a parade of ideas by consultants and beta banking plays such as Moven.There is no shortage of investment in this approach worldwide, with payments-linked businesses attracting one fifth of venture capital investment flows in 2013. Yet is it even worth it? Woolworths built a small beer card balance of less than A$1 billion. HSBC recently handballed this asset to Macquarie, less than a fifth of the asset base of GE Capital in Australia (of which credit cards is only one part). Tesco in the UK is the model most often cited, but that retailer's banking arm is hardly an antidote when supermarket earnings flag, as they have recently.Coles also needs to clarify why GE - the financial institution with the worst reputation in Australia for customer treatment - is now its partner.Just how many capital resources will a banking-risk balance sheet consume, the Wesfarmers directors will be wondering. The only good news for Coles might