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Nice post. Adds a touch to realism to the brouhaha over neobanks. 

Cross-border instant payments for European businesses already exists. It's called TARGET2 and it has been around for ~10 years.

I agree that evolutions take time but the title of this post calls Micropayments a revolution. It has taken only 4-5 years for many new services to become household names e.g. AirBnB, Grab, Ola, PayTM, Uber, et al. These are revolutionary, at least in hindsight. Given its track record, Micropayments surely does not exhibit traits of being revolutionary.

The study accepts that banks have generated greater profit from digital transformation. That means digital transformation has delivered financial boost. It does not really matter - in this limited context - whether the greater profit has come from increase in revenue or decrease in cost. 

Micropayments was a hot topic in 2009 when I wrote about it on my personal blog.

Finextra carried an article entitled The Big Story of Micropayments in 2015. My comment on that article is valid even today.

Every few years, micropayments becomes a hot topic, only to fizzle out after a few months. 

As a recent FORTUNE article quipped, “Someone once told me that micropayments was an idea ‘that has a lot of potential - and always will,’ meaning of course that it will never actually happen.”

Of course, this time could be different, because of recent launches of Basic Attention Token, Kin Kik and Facebook Libra, all of whom have set their sights on micropayments as a key target market for their new cryptocurrencies.

Only time will tell.  

Re. "The unpleasant fact - Bitcoin does not provide any consumer protection", ditto A2A payment methods like Zelle (USA), FPS (UK), UPI / NEFT (India). They have intermediaries but are as irrepudiatable as cash and BTC which happen directly between two parties. Card payments are repudiatable because they're designed to be repudiatable. Not because they are processed through intermediaries.

For years, I hadn't heard anything about myBank. That changed when I read MyBank-initiated payments hit EUR 10 billion milestone today. 

EUR 10B processing volumes in 6 years does not exactly sound like a blockbuster success in this day and age of $50B per year processed by PayTM in India and >$1T / year processed by Alipay, WeChat et al in China. But it's at least nice to know that myBank is still alive and kicking.

In 2011, in one of my earliest blog posts on Finextra, I predicted that EBA Clearing myBank will be a hit. EUR 10B processing volumes in 6 years does not exactly sound like a blockbuster success but I'm at least happy that myBank is still alive and kicking. 

One study says 3/5 i.e. 60% of Millennials will borrow from Traditional Lender. 

Another study says quarter i.e. 25% of Consumers borrowed from Alternative Lender, which means 75% did borrow from Traditional Lender. 

60% versus 75% is hardly a major disconnect.

Every stock exchange could be manipulated by a single order at some point in its evolution. I'm throwing some random numbers here but it was probably 100 yrs ago for LSE, 50 yrs for NYSE, 30 yrs for DB and 10 yrs for BSE. It's perfectly natural that it'd be now for cryptoexchanges. As they become bigger - assuming they ever do - they will be less susceptible to being manipulated. Re. Bot, memory serves, they caused massive volatility in NYSE / NASDAQ even 5-6 years ago. That goes with the territtory. No reason why cryptoexchanges should be an exception or their risk from bot be any greatly higher than conventional exchanges.