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Day to day life is busy enough without having to juggle multiple bank accounts! Only time will tell but, as of now, this feature seems like a solution searching for a problem. 

"People with middle initials are more credit worthy".

This is an insight uncovered by banks via Big Data analytics. As a result, if there's a toss up between making a loan to one person with middle initial and another person without middle initial, all other things being equal, a bank will make the loan to the former. To me, this is a best practice.

That said, since the decision is prejudiced against people without middle initial and is unfair to that cohort, it also qualifies as a bias according to the dictionary meaning of the term.  

Curious to know if there's an objective way to distinguish between Best Practice and Bias. Unless there is, we can keep talking about avoiding bias without really making any progress. End of the day, a whole lot of work in AI / ML is around analysis of data to uncover such insights.  

Re. the headline, PhonePe is just one of the dozens of digital payment services in India. All debit cards and credit cards, which are also counted as digital payments, worked fine (except those issued by YES Bank). Anyway the point is now moot because even PhonePe is back up for over 24 hours by now. 

This could work! I gave many examples of switching opportunities surfaced by PFM apps in A Killer Feature For PFM On The Eve Of PSD2. In all cases, the "transfer proved to be far more cumbersome than I'd anticipated". I'd envisaged automatic switching of providers / plans as a killer feature for PFM.

If Youtility really works as advertised and actually enables switching of utility providers in the promised two minutes, it has a good thing going and I'm very bullish about the startup's outlook.

Like most new-age tech-driven startups, fintechs are VC funded. The way the VC Investment Model works, in the initial rounds of funding, it rewards growth over profits (or even revenues) with skyhigh valuations. Unburdened by revenue and profit considerations, the fintech can afford to overcommit and overdeliver, thus finding it easy to foster trust during this phase. 

However, the rubber hits the road during later stages of funding when revenues - even profits - become critical. It becomes difficult for the fintech to continue doing what it was doing earlier. In other words, later funding stages put a tremendous strain on trust maintenance.  

I illustrated this challenge in my blog post PayTM Shows How Fintechs Can Lose Trust with the specific example of India's largest fintech.

According to the common narrative, fintechs who fail to to surmount this challenge will die. But, going by the robust growth in customer count and valuation of PayTM in the subsequent two years after I published the aforementioned post, I'm not so sure.

PayPal is another example that comes to mind. During its +20 years of existence, the fintech has surely not enjoyed growing trust from the merchant community, what with the rising number of merchant accounts it keeps freezing arbitrarily.   

Sometimes I wonder if trust is overrated, at least in the context of fintechs.

LOL maybe the penalty for data breach is lower than that for incompetence!!!

Of course, UBER will do the right thing, just that it will be right by itself, its shareholders and its promoters. It's well known that Uber has leveraged regulatory gaps wherever possible. HBR goes a step further and alleges the company with "mounting scandals" and exhorts regulators to shut it down. Uber is optimistic that it will continue to get away with its footloose, fancyfree approach towards regs. So far it has succeeded, and its approach to London ban is yet another exhibit. 

Against that backdrop, good luck with your optimism.

Banning Uber reminds me of an old saying about smoking: "It's easy to quit smoking. I've done it so many times".

I first heard that Uber was banned in London a year or two. Then I heard Uber would continue to operate in London until some appeal. Everything went quiet until 3 months ago when we once again heard that Uber is banned in London. I just fired up my Uber app. I'm still able to see rides from my home to office in London.

Uber can get banned but it's another thing for Uber to go off the roads! Uber seems to be a law unto itself. I seriously doubt if the company will be too bothered about mundane matters like legalities of driver onboarding even for itself, let alone lead by example for the rideshare industry.

Nice post but keen to know how TransferWise manages to send money cross-border only basis beneficiary account number. Doesn't it require at least the name of the bene's bank, if not also branch?

I'm looking forward to the day I can send money cross-border only basis bene's name and National ID # (such as SSN in USA, NI# in UK, Aadhaar # in India). 

@Chetan Ghadge + 1. 

That's exactly what I'd written at the end of my post entitled Innovative Fintechs Don’t Need No PSD2 Regulation:

"Fintechs who're still not convinced that they should shed their reliance on 'open banking' should just pause to contemplate their future if said regulation becomes two-sided and requires fintechs to share their customer info with banks."

Sadly, things are going in the opposite direction in other industries.

As soon as PayPal bought honey for $4B, Amazon suddenly started flashing a warning on its checkout screen, highlighting the security risks of using the popular Coupon Browser Extension and urging customers to remove it.

LinkedIn recently blocked hiQ from accessing profile info despite the fact that 100% of the said info is entered by and belongs to Users.

Apple of course spins its policy as "protecting consumer privacy" but less said the better about its chances of sharing fitness data with third parties.