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@Melvin Haskins + 1 unless I'm missing something BIG. I'd expect riots on the streets if one in five Brits were defrauded on their credit cards in any single year. If the remarkable old book by Darrell Huff is out of print, you can get a good idea from my blog posts Beware Of Committing Harakiri By Lying With Big Data and How To Lie With Big Data. TBH, this report reeks of method #4 (Pixie Dust Sample) of lying with Big Data. Although, with a sample size of 2000, it doesn't even qualify for "Small Data".

Okay, jokes apart, this push button won't put anyone in debt. It appears on a credit card, which is already debt territory. Besides, maybe because of emerging marketing dynamics or high NIMs enjoyed by banks or kickback from merchants or whatever, many consumer loans in India are interest-free, at least for durations up to 12 months. So, IMO, the convenience benefit of this push button far outweigh the debt trap cost.

@VernonCrabtree:

If banks introduce "pain in applying for a loan", fintechs will grab all their customers; by offering highly frictionless loan products with terms and conditions that neither fintechs nor consumers will understand, fintechs will inflict death by thousand cuts on banks; banks will fast become extinct; yada yada yada.

Looks like you're not very fond of banks, to put it mildly:)))

There are various alternative ways to decide how to direct a card payment but, for more reasons than one, this push button card is easily the most frictionless method for doing so: (1) Press button, it can't get simpler than that, no fumbling around with smartphone lockscreen, firing an app, finding the correct option (2) Single item, fewer moving parts, bound to be more reliable (3) No dependency on network signal strength, will always work (4) Uses button cell, which hopefully lasts the entire duration of the card's validity; or, even if it doesn't, it can be simply replaced without the need for daily charging.

Kudos to IndusInd Bank for channelizing its innovation efforts into areas where they add tangible value, instead of developing solutions seeking problems. 

It's a free market; a plethora of challenger banks have mushroomed to provide alternatives; customers can switch banks; CASS makes the switch relatively frictionless.

Not sure why banks should have to justify branch closures to anyone - that too "properly":) It's better to shut down branches instead of eventually having to shut down banks, the way many retailers had to do.

TPPs shouldn't be freeloaders. If they want to benefit from the data, they should think about how they'd compensate banking customers who provide that data. After the FB-CA fracas, former carrots like targeted offers, superior CX won't work. If TPPs pay for data more directly as I'd highlighted in Open Banking Needs A Blockchain Boost, I predict that the awareness and adoption of Open Banking will hit the next level. 

Your original post is about payments. Why is my comment about payments limiting? I know the large topic of supply chain has a lot of middleman but that's a different subject. Besides, with the D2C movement gaining traction, the "eliminate middleman" ethos is creeping into the sale-purchase process as well. 

I thought my comment was quite clear. To rephrase, absence of middleman in a cash payment is during the sale / purchase transaction i.e. in the transfer of value. As I highlighted in my blog post How To Really Kill Cash, "Cash is also the only form of payment that accomplishes transfer of value between payor and payee without any dependency on bank, hardware, software, network, battery, and other third parties".

Buyer and Seller are really only the two parties to a transaction. Cash is the only method of payment that allows a sale / purchase transaction to happen without introducing a middleman. I have a professional interest in the growth of digital payments and don't have any problem with a cashless society. But, as an innocent bystander, I'm eternally intrigued by one thing: How come so many people who diss the middleman in so many other facets of life are so comfortable with the proliferation of cashless modes of payments, which require a middleman.

TY @WP.