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Thanks. I had a quick look at this app store. Click here to see a screengrab of apps under CONSUMER category. I see "Charitable giving", which I'm guessing is a niche use case of payments.

Any idea why general purpose PAYMENTS is conspicuous by absence? (Ditto in BUSINESS category).

This is definitely "WTF News of the Day"!

When there are so many other ways to send abusive messages, anonymously and otherwise, I'm extremely curious to know why somebody would choose the "space-poor" transaction description / narration field of a payment message for this purpose.

I hope banks don't use this as a red herring to totally scuttle key initiatives like Enhanced Remittance Data that they already seem to have put on the backburner.

Great post!

We regularly come across fintech founders, often from tech background with finserv domain expertise, concentrating 100% on product and engineering, under the mistaken notion that consumers will queue up to buy their products because of x-y-z reasons. Obviously life doesn't work that way. By the time they realize that, they have exhausted all their money on product development and fade away into oblivion because they have nothing left for marketing / customer acquisition. I have seen this movie countless times.   

I totally agree that Winner Takes All does not happen in finserv because there's no new product. But, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on whether it has actually happened in any other industry, either? At least, I have not. According to basic principles of Economics, even a monopoly can dictate only price or demand, but not both. If last man standing tries to engage in price gouging, either the regulator can clamp down with price controls or the customer can always switch to a substitute or, if no substitute exists,  exercise the option of buying nothing at all. 

Nice post. Many points resonate with my experience with boosting conversion rate of finserv websites. To add a couple of points that go a long way towards increasing conversion of browers to buyers: (1) Clear communications - overcommunication is better than undercommunication on a website when there's no human operator waiting to provide guidance and clarifications (2) Consistency between label and description. One bank used branch name as label but address used to describe the branch location did not mention a single word of the area by which the branch was named. 

Any idea what is the transaction value? I read a random post on Twitter yesterday claiming a figure of $110M. I thought it was too low compared to $1.2B and $880M, the two figures that I've seen bandied around in Finextra in the past for MoneyGram's valuation.

UK has 94% Credit Card penetration and, arguably, >100% Debit Card penetration. Maybe it's only me but I find it hard to understand how "A significant number of individuals simply don’t have access to credit and debit cards." 

Great, please let me know when you're in a position to give out some references. 

Way to go, Barclaycard! Explicit 2FA is a conversion killer and blood pressure booster. Glad it's another winner that won't let security screw up user experience. 

Winners Don't Let Security Screw Up User Experience

I thought index / ETF was passive investing where you created a portfolio onetime to mirror a preexisting index and let its value go up or down based entirely on market movements - in short "set it up and forget about it" style of investing. Not sure what's the role of AI in that. OTOH, it does require AI to use alternative data in order to predict price movements of individual stocks and trade on that basis. There are dozens of solutions like that in the market but I haven't seen the term index associated with any of them.

Sure. How many mainstream banks use this chat-based fraud management system?