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Best wishes to NatWest. "Voice Banking" is truly a paradigm-shifting interface. It's the only interface that really recognizes that banking is a chore and lets customers do it in the background while they're doing more value-added tasks in the foreground.

Well, if you bought BTC in Dec 2016, you'd be sitting on a massive profit. I think it was you that pointed out in another comment that everything changes if you change the start date:)

When law enforcement / regulators warn people to stay away from anything that's "too good to be true", the average man on the street heeds their warning. But the cashed up folks may not - it's probably by taking bold bets on similar "too good to be true" schemes and products that worked that they became cashed up in the first place compared to the average man on the street. $2.7M loss is nothing - there are individual whales who have made that much - and more - by investing in crypto. You can't win 'em all. 

Being personal lawyer to a POTUS obviously goes at the top of Kasowitz's bio but it should not take away his firm's unique distinction of being the first law firm to win a jury trial in an ERP software lawsuit. As it says on the firm's website, "The trial appears to be the first instance in which a jury found professional negligence by a software implementation firm."

Criminals and Porn Watchers have been doing fine with fiat. Now that IRS has sent notices to millions of Americans with Bitcoin / Altcoin, Bitcoin's compelling value for Tax Evaders is also diminishing. OTOH, Bakkt, Libra and other cryptocurrency ventures from mainstream companies has pushed up the allure for Bitcoin. Anything that sells for $11,348.30 can't be *that* worthless. Let's see what happens in the future.

"International Payments" is in the title of this post. Problem definition is for international payments. AFAIK, the cited solutions from Monzo, Apple Pay and Amazon are domestic payment solutions. Curious to know what's their relevance in the context of international payments.

Also one point re. mobile wallets in India. The popular products are PayTM, PayZapp, PhonePe, BHIM, Google Pay. Even if some of them have a proprietary wallet, fact is, all of them support UPI, an interbank standard defined and administered by NPCI, a bank-consortium. UPI allows Person A using Google Pay to send payments from their account in Bank A to Person B's account in Bank B, notwithstanding whether Person B uses Google Pay or PhonePe, or whatever. Ergo, they are totally interoperable. They are also zero cost for customers and are not restricted in any usual sense of the term. (But they don't support international payments.)

That’s services mindset. Rigidity - and the perceived arrogance that comes with it - are best practices in product business. It happens even in highly competitive industries and has nothing to do with monopoly / oligopoly. Every Tom Dick & Harry who doesn’t get a discount will have a common sense view of facing a monopoly, which is rubbish. "Abuse of monopoly" is necessarily a legal construct.

I can elaborate but this discussion has veered way far off course from the original topic. I’ll be happy to continue it offline.

Oh, arrogance. Yeah right. Terribly monopolistic. Retailers should sue banks for monopolistic behavior, then.

On a side note, "products/services that are nearly identical to each other" is the textbook definition of commodity, whose purveyors are destined to go on a race to the bottom with lower and lower prices. If that's what banking is, retailers should rejoice. 

I totally welcome the probe into AWS. Too often, end customers are blamed unilaterally for data breaches when the root cause could lie elsewhere. As I'd asked in my post entitled Why Is This Data Breach Different?, "Was the data stolen from inhouse data centers of the payment processors? Or was it located on a "cloud" provided by some third party cloud services companies?" 

Not talking about AWS specifically, but it's no secret that most IaaS providers make all kinds of claims before the sale - e.g. "cloud eliminates your infra overheads" - but, after the sale, turn around and say even basic infra hygeine like backups are not covered by them.

It's high time cloud infra providers are pinned down to their presales commitments and held at least partially liable for penalties for data breaches.

Kudos to whoever that pushed back on the regulators to create this postponement. SCA will indeed be a major conversion killer and blood pressure booster, as we've seen in India. In the USA, they've been postponing FFIEC 2FA guidelines since 2005, it's still not happened. Let's see how long the EU postponement lasts.