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An Open Banking should be a natural initiative from the banking community, not pushed authoritatively.

The EU regulatory authorities remind me of an elephant in a china shop. An equally unwise move with their PSD2 as with forbidding earlier mobile roaming fees in Europe. Anyway, although the PSD2 is backed by, presumably, good intentions, its implementation is highly prone to data security breaches given its technical design. You don't have to a Sherlock to deduce that data shared among many parties is more likely to be lost/hacked, despite all security efforts.

As to the article's central point, I can't get why banks have to necessarily switch to cloud-computing because of the PSD2 requirements.

It's dubious that people who can't afford themselves such a simple thing as a bank account, could start enjoying the much more complicated "blockchain" stuff.The "underbankeds" must be aided by their governments, blockchain or not.

Quite an opinion which I nevertheless like, but the total money digitisation must be balanced with the rights for the private life of each individual. If a regulator uncontrollably controls (sounds so-so) one's whole life then we may end up with a global North Korea.

A good effort to summarize blockchain applicability, but there are a few arguable points:

1. By its design blocks are not encrypted. They contain individual transaction hashes and other data, which are unencrypted.
2. Transaction details aren't encrypted either in public blockchains. You can only guess the sender and receiver by their signatures/adresses but the remaining data is open, that's the design of public blockchains. Private networks may use data encryption to a certain extent but in the case of AML/KYC systems you have to make the data available to regulatory bodies, which is a technical challenge. It's quite easy to encrypt and decrypt data between 2 parties, but it needs non-trivial workarounds to make the data available to 3rd parties.
3. Usually regulatory authorities instruct financial organisations how to act upon detection of suspicious operations, on which they then report back. Regulators need not to track all suspicious activities in real time, it's banks' duty. So my conclusion is that the blockchain isn't needed in AML/KYC that badly.
4. Blockchain or, more precisely, DLT does not offer better safety than centralised systems, because DLT uses the same encryption technology and approach. In fact, due to its nature DLT is more prone to compromising/leaking data than the centralised database. So DLT is to be used in extreme cases when it's truly justified.