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LOL. I read "How To Lie With Statistics" over 40 years ago and forgot he had given a name for Floating Origin charts! I used to think the same way about newspapers and websites until I tried to plot a few charts on Excel myself. As described in the post, Excel has changed it default origin. It's no longer at 0,0. But newspapers and websites are responsible for changing it back to 0,0 but they seem to be conveniently asleep at the watch.

I know people choose banks based on security of funds, fees, ease of deposit, proximity of branch, interest rate, etc. But, TBH, I don't know anyone who chooses a bank because it's a not-for-profit bank. I've also read dozens of reports on "Ten Things To Consider When Choosing A Bank or Credit Union". I haven't seen "nonprofit" as a factor affecting choice of FI in a single report.

Why should it? IME, the man on the street only has a vague understanding of what even the term nonprofit means (no, it does not mean the company does not make profits).

Happy to be proven wrong if you can cite reports that say otherwise. 

I don't see where's the problem with instore use of Apple Card. It's is a plastic - er, titanium - MasterCard credit card with a chip and will work just like any other plastic credit card on any POS terminal that accepts MasterCard. Just that, in the plastic form factor, it won't fetch as much cashback as it would if it were used virtually via Apple Pay. In any case, Apple claims that Apple Pay is accepted at 70% of all retail locations in the USA. So there's that also...

LOL I've heard that Blockchain is many things including 'best thing since sliced bread' but "Denial of Service Attack on Innovation Dollars" is a first:)

Good post. CX is key but banks don't seem to accept it. A recent experience: My credit card issuer - a Top 5 UK bank - recently launched chat. I wanted to inquire when I'd get the PIN for my new credit card. The CSR told me not to enter the credit card # in the chatbox. I asked why. He said, I should share sensitive info only on a secure channel like PhoneBanking. I posted on Twitter saying this bank seems to be emasculating chat channel to protect jobs of call center employees. It replied back saying phonebanking is secure. I said any channel can be made secure. If it implies that chat is not secure, then I can't believe its claim that its phone channel is secure.

Long story short, its chat was useless, I had to keep calling phonebanking to get my PIN. All this while, my new credit card was as good as not-activated beause I wasn't able to use it without PIN, it was more than a month since I got the new credit card, the bank lost interchange revenues, nobody but me seemed to care. Around the same time, I read about Apple Card and how it can be activated in 3 minutes!

Sigh, I wonder when will banks learn to remove friction and enhance CX!!

Nice post. From personal experience and anecdotal evidence, let me add another point: Many people who are high tech in other areas are happy to be "low tech" when it comes to finances. Ergo, ~70% of Millennials in USA have accounts with one of the five largest traditional banks. I highlighted this in my post entitled Will Millennials Bankrupt Neobanks? 

I don't see anything opaque or unfair about landlords asking for deposits but rounding up enough money for a deposit can be a pain area for tenants, especially the ones with lower incomes. Flatfair is manna from heaven for that market segment.

TY for your detailed response. 

No, I'm not referring just to the US model. AFAIK, PayPal has been offering Merchant Aggregation model in EU / UK for +15 years; STRIPE began doing so in circa 2013.

Eventually only an Acquirer can provide a Merchant Account. But the difference between plain vanilla PSP and STRIPE-like Merchant Aggregator model is who frontends / underwrites the Merchant Account. In the PSP model, Merchant must get Merchant Account directly from Acquirer, which is quite a PITA. In the Merchant Aggregator model, Merchant Aggregator gets a Master Merchant Account from the Acquirer in its own name, which it then "rents" out to individual Merchants, who need not approach the Acquirer at all. So, there's a big difference in the scope of work - and value proposition thereof - between PSP and Merchant Aggregator, at least for Merchants who don't get a Merchant Account directly from an Acquirer.  

I agree it's heavily dependent on the business model.

That said, I think Merchant Aggregators do carry out some amount of KYC before onboarding Sub Merchants - or whatever the end Merchants are called.

I don't get your line "Acquirers aren't particularly keen on taking on that risk": Isn't it the the raison d'être of Acquirer to sign up Merchants? Whatever risk that entails must go with the territory! In any case, in the Merchant Aggregator model, the end Merchant's sales proceeds come into the Merchant Aggregator's account from where the Merchant Aggregator must approve movement of the funds to the end Merchant's bank account. In case of fraud or whatever, the Merchant Aggregator can always freeze the funds, as PayPal keeps doing ostensibly to mitigate its risk. Maybe Square and Stripe do the same for the same reason. My implicit point was that the PSP business has been commoditized for a long time. With due respect to your five areas of value add, it's still quite difficult to differentiate oneself on plain vanilla payment processing features alone. OTOH, many merchants still have a lot of pain in getting a Merchant Account directly from a Bank, so if PSP offers sub Merchant Account, that'd be a winner.

Put differently, why should a business go to a PSP and be left to its own devices to get a Merchant Account from a Bank, when it can totally bypass PSPs by going to a Merchant Aggregator like Stripe and avoid that challenge, and get payment processing anyway included with that?

AFAIK, PayPal and STRIPE are the only two PSPs that provide Merchant Aggregation services for online payments - SQUARE does the same for instore payments - whereby the Merchant does not need a Merchant Account from an Acquirer Bank. If my understanding is right, any thoughts on why many more PSPs don't offer Merchant Aggregation as a differentiator?