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From our work in Conversion Rate Optimization, I can vouch for your guidance to etailers that they must avoid "Anything that takes the customer offsite". But, once EU / UK enforces the Strong Customer Authentication mandate, it may be impossible for the etailer to follow this guidance since the strong / second factor of authentication will need to happen directly between the Customer and Issuer Bank website. 

Re. "Sometimes we fall into the trap of believing if something is said enough times it must be true or at least have an element of truth.", sadly it's not a trap but a law:( 

Called "Clear's Law of Recurrence", it states "The number of people who believe an idea is directly proportional to the number of times it has been repeated - even if the idea is false."

Going by this law, the more the number of people took this post at face value, the less the chances that it would be caught out. 

When I filed Income Tax Return in UK, I didn't have to pay tax since I was eligible for Refund, so I don't recall what were the payment methods supported for paying tax. But, going by this article, it would appear that only card payments are supported. In India, for over a decade, we've been having a payment method called Bank Transfer / NetBanking whereby we log in to our online bank account, see a prefilled screen and initiate a payment within the same tax filing session. This payment method exists for not just income tax but all kinds of government and private sector merchant payments. And the thing is, all this has been working fine for over 10 years without any EU-style Open Banking in place. 

While this is surely a use case for Open Banking in UK, I'm not sure if it comes anywhere close to an achievement of the mission of Open Banking. Also, if Open Banking is implemented true to its charter, it should be extremely easy for HMRC tax filing system to directly consume the APIs of different bank systems. I don't get why another set of Middleman is required between HMRC system and Banks under Open Banking regime.

Credit Card has generally been the most profitable business in Retail Banking. While it's quite capital intensive, nobody shuts down a credit card business unless they're running out of capital.

Good one!

Here's another one:

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” ~ The Big Short movie. While this quote - attributed to Mark Twain - rings very true, I've never been able to find too many examples for it.

Although the movie and book are on banking, the quote appears only in the movie version, so the book version is of no help in finding examples, at least none that are self-explanatory. 

Can you think of any good examples?

I know I shouldn't conflate stock with flow but $10M fine can't be too "hefty" for a $11.2B valuation company:) 

For some reason, I'm reminded of the closing line of the FORTUNE magazine article on Archer Daniels Midland lysine price fixing scandal in the mid 1990s: 

"Not only does crime pay, it’s just the cost of doing business."

It was "foodtech" then, it's fintech now!

I tried my old saturn.de account. It worked!

At the start of checkout, it displayed logos of Visa, MC, Klarna and many other PSPs. But, at the penultimate stage of checkout, it asked me to enter my address for "invoice" without displaying any other payment methods. That was dodgy!

I guess Saturn is one of the ecommerce merchants in Germany that offers BNPL / Credit as default payment method.

I'm reminded of my many trips to SATURN in Germany in the early 2000s. I was always perplexed by this electronic retailer's policy of refusing credit cards. Then one day, while standing in the long checkout queue made longer by people patiently forking out cash to hand over to the cashier, I noticed a sign for a SATURN-Visa co-branded credit card. I thought things had changed until I reached the checkout counter, only to be told by the attendant that the co-branded card was only a marketing tool for branding purpose, and that SATURN still did not accept credit card!

From refusing its own credit card to offering credit as default payment method - SATURN has come a long way!

Sorry but this doesn't answer my question. You're talking about Klarna's aspiration. Frankly, every PSP in the world will aspire for all merchants in the world to use only their payment method. But that's not the same as reality.

My question was / is, how many Merchants have BNPL / credit line options from these PSPs as the default or only option on their checkout page? TBH, I haven't seen a single one.

Can you cite a couple of examples of such Merchants / Billers who have "a default option to give the customer a new credit and set up an on-line credit line"? 

I'm reminded of this Finextra post Payment industry is heating up but is it helping merchants? and my comments below it. It's from 2012.

Eight years ago, we were saying that there was a plethora of payment methods available to Merchants!