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LOL I never thought I'd see a line out of Lewis Carroll in the title of a blog post on finance!

Seems like yet another exhibit of rogue regulation. Hope US Chamber of Commerce wins this lawsuit à la Grayscale won its case against SEC, which led to the approval of Bitcoin ETF. 

LOL this totally confirms my prediction that "Banks will thank regulators for providing the chance to delay payments and earn float income under the pretense that they're "carrying out extra due diligence on the authenticity of the payment"."

I agree with RBI's Enforcement Actions like Reg PayTM and Reg BPSP, even if some have found it disproportionately harsh.

I disagree with RBI's "throw baby out with the bathwater" policy making like Reg Emandate, Reg PPI and Reg UL.

My Two Cents On PayTM Kerfuffle.

If a poor country like India has any chance of leveraging emerging market dynamics and become a middle income country within the forseeable future, it can only be by being entrepreneurial, taking risks and exhibting "animal spirits", as various politicians and government leaders have regularly highlighted. RBI's extreme aversion to risk in policy making is more suited to countries that are already rich and must prioritize capital protection over growth à la how PWM / Private Banking customers behave versus how Retail Banking customers behave. 

You can find my take on NatWest v. India BNPL in my comment below the article. 

Are there no eKYC complications / friction hotspots for online account opening?

As I predicted in BNPL Ain't Killing Banks. It's Making Them Rich a few years ago, it's less work and more returns for banks to engage in wholesale lending to nonbank BNPLs than to get into retail lending directly to consumers.

In India, recent regulations like Reg UL have made life difficult for nonbank BNPL providers, and paved the way for banks to become more aggressive in this space. Going by the last line in the original article, I'm guessing lobbying / regulatory capture wasn't attempted / didn't work out in UK.

"The bottom line is that coreless banking is about liberating financial institutions from their reliance on outdated legacy infrastructure."

This is true if "legacy" means CBS systems like FLEXCUBE, Temenos, etc. They're monolithic systems providing a vast swathe of functionality and are owned by a single vendor. Although they were positioned as "open systems" when they were launched 30-35 years ago, some may call them legacy and outdated today since they belong to the previous generation! 

This is not true if "legacy" means older mainframe systems since they spread the CBS functionality across multiple systems owned by multiple entitites. For example, at a Top 5 UK Bank, the central mainframe system supports only account balances, which is a tiny functionality by the standards of CBS. Different products run on different systems interfaced with this mainframe-based accounting system.

In a way, coreless marks a return to the "best of breed" mainframe era landscape that comprised multiple systems, just with API, microservices, and other open interface methods. 

To ride the Internet / Web / Ebusiness wave, our ERP company launched a series of addon products like Web / Customer, Web / Supplier, Web / Employee, etc. 

AI CoPilot for Sales, AI CoPilot for Finance, etc. are likely following the same playbook to ride the present AI wave!

Judging by how that movie played out, this one will also be a blockbuster hit. AI has as much enabling power as Web - in fact maybe more. Then and now, MRP runs and advanced ERP functionality were / are not on the web but it's very easy to imagine how they can leverage AI to become faster / better / cheaper.

I'm afraid "existing payment system challenges" of PayByBank / A2A RTP will continue to persist as long as its proponents continue to miss two key facts of consumer behavior: (1) Incumbent method of payment is credit card, which offers rewards, deferred payment and fraud protection. A2A RTP does not (2) Consumers decide method of payment, merchants don't, so higher cost of credit card acceptance is irrelevant. 

Seven years after I asked Can Chatbots Replace Humans? here, I have a definitive answer: Yes, chatbots have replaced 700 human FTEs at Klarna.

Of course, the chatbot then was following a series of intelligent-human-written IF-THEN rules in an arguably dumb manner whereas the chatbot now is hopefully smart enough to write those rules by itself and / or make use of AI in some other ways.