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Should Bank and Store be in two different countries OR is SWIFT also active in domestic payments?

More recently, the Indian Aadhaar Enabled Payment System - very similar to PayByTouch - seemed very promising. Until the Supreme Court outlawed the use of Aadhaar biometrics for anything other than its original charter around benefit payments. IMO, these account-linked payment methods offer payers no compelling reason to switch from credit cards, which offer many benefits like rewards, and are likely to succeed only in markets where credit card penetration is quite low e.g. India. 

For someone who lives outside the USA, USA seems least affected by government overreach, especially when it comes to payments, a major area of fintech e.g. no 2FA mandate for online payments, which is mandated by regulator in India and tends to kill conversion and thwart the adoption of digital payments. I guess the grass is always green on the other side!

Sorry but crypto payments are neither cheap nor fast. (1) $19 fees for a $1 crypto-to-crypto payment (Source). (2) Story of my never-completing crypto payment. 

Not surprisingly, usage of Bitcoin as a method of retail payment has decreased by 80 percent this year (Source). 

Lack of intermediary in a crypto payment is a myth: The crypto provider / dApp that handles the payment does exactly the job of an intermediary.

With my background in Marketing, I can confidently say that Marketing will never be able to get away with fiction like this.

@Derek Corcoran + 1.

I said so myself at http://lnr.li/. That said, there could be a case for supporting such functionality on mega-ATMs aka Kiosks. 

In my blog post published on the eve of launch of PSD2, I'd predicted several innovative products / services / features on top of Open Banking, the common themes being "capitalize on external factors to make more money" and "Recommend-and-Execute". 

One year later, is there any traction on this front? With due respect to Yolt, MINT and other PFMs / MoMMAs have been supporting the same basic account aggregation functionality for over a decade - some via screen scraping and others via OFX and other common data interchange formats, and all via self-proclaimed secure technologies, just not API, which is a detail that really doesn't matter that much to the average consumer. 

Re. "Unlike screen scraping, Open Banking does not require customers to provide passwords to third parties to access accounts on their behalf." How exactly, then, will consumer allow third-party app to access his or her bank account? By creating one new password for each API being accessed and sharing only that password with the corresponding 3rd party app?? 

Nobody allowed screen scraping all this while. Not sure how anybody can ban screen scraping now. Put differently, what exactly will happen after Sep. 2019 when a screen-scraping app does exactly what it has been doing before Sep. 2019?

Contrary to your claim, alternatives to screen scraping have been around for years e.g. OFX file format for downloading statement of account. Kublax, a UK PFM that came and went over a decade ago, had used this technology. But screen scraping (e.g. Mint) has always prevailed over the alternatives for whatever reasons. 

Anyway, in the age of FB-CA fracas and widespread data breaches, enough water has flown under the bridge and I strongly doubt whether basic access mechanisms matter anymore. Open Banking Needs A Blockchain Boost  

Since when has 50% digital access become a "global tipping point"? The Indian bank I profiled in Why Branch And Digital Channels Will Coexist Forever claimed that 90% of its transactions were happening on digital channels and this was two years ago.

True dat @JoãoBohner. To paraphrase a famous Al Capone saying about smile and guns, you can get a lot more done with goodwill and clear communications than with goodwill alone!