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As a user I can see no difference between a VRP and a Variable Amount Direct Debit, particularly for utilities, which vary month by month. VADDs have been in use for 40 years or more in the UK and for about 15 years in the US. They work perfectly, so what is the point of VRPs. 

The statement by FICO that 56% of consumers would leave their bank if it were found to have been involved in a money laundering schem is pure fantasy. Most consumers never find out that their bank is fined for money laundering and most do not care anyway. HSBC was fined a huge amount for money laundering for drug cartels in Mexico. How many HSBC customers changed banks after this. No-one knows, but I suspect the numbers were very small, Suggest that you read the Darryl Huff book - How to lie with statistics.

In the third decade of the 21st century you should not be racially sterotyping people. So many people are now of mixed race (ex-President Obama and Tiger Woods are prime examples of people with a black father and a non-black mother). What about low and middle income income whites, muslims and asians?

You are quite right - roboadvisors can be just as biased as humans. All of the human financial advisors that I have met have been biased and I stopped using them 15 years ago.

At no point do you address bias. I have found, time and again, that the human advisors that I have used have biases towards certain investments and can even be biased by the amount of commission that they will receive if you buy certain investments. In my view, robo advisors do not have bias and are, therefore, better.

Whilst fraud needs to be addressed, so does affordability. Is the person purchases the goods able to repay? This is as much of a problem as fraud, if not greater.

Sorry, I do not believe that anyone other than the Payee Bank has responsibility. They have allowed the person to open the account without carrying out KYC. They are the enablers - not the telco, mobile handset manufacturer, utility company or anyone else. That is like blaming the car manufacturer and the road constructor when a driver. deliberately kills someone using a vehicle.

Having learnt, many years ago, to store credit cards, cash and passport in different pockets, because of pickpockets and the potential to lose one or more, I would never put all of the information on my phone. Phone theft is rife and what if you drop and break the phone? This is no different to carrying a physical wallet, with all of your cash, creit cards and passport in it and then either losing the wallet or having it stolen.

Am I being simple, or does it all come down to one simple thing - KYC? Making account opening easy has been a desire of banks for many years, so that they can gain clients, but they attract fly-by-night accounts such as Jane, who use this easy-to-open-an-account to scam people. Surely the responsibility for reimbursing the losing party sits with the Payee bank for allowing the scammer to open the account.

This looks like a classic 'How to lie with statistics'. What is needed is a true comparison of card usage. Do people in the UK use their cards more often and for larger sums than their European counterparts? Cash is certainly king in a number of European countries. Without a proper comparison this study should be taken with a pinch of salt.