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@Michael Fuller: LOL. From what I remember of pager recurring monthly rentals, this could actually be a cheap pager:)

Also Andrew Saines + 1. VC-funded fintechs can erode trust very rapidly - an ability that stodgy, old banks totally lack. PayTM Shows How Fintechs Can Lose Trust

Industry-wide, total switches seem to be less than 50K. That's extremely underwhelming (<0.2%) considering there must be at least 30M current accounts in UK.

Totally agree with Vijay Sondhi. Cross-border B2B payment is indeed broken although I wouldn't put the entire blame on SWIFT. Some of my customers in the US who bank with credit unions / community banks tell me that their bank doesn't know what SWIFT BIC code is or how to initiate a payment to an overseas supplier. When it comes to national banks, other customers who bank with them say they need to fill endless forms to initiate a cross-border payment (cost is not such a big deal, actually, at least for the ticket sizes involved in my examples). So, yes, B2B cross-border payments can do with a big shot of upending - by crypto or otherwise.

LOL.

This reminds me of BHIM v. PayM timescales. The demonetization of high value currency notes in November 2016 caused a severe cash crunch in India during the last two months of 2016. The government began promoting digital payments to replace cash. In response, many banks released A2A mobile payment apps based on Universal Payment Interface (UPI), the payment system launched by the nation’s retail payments body National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) a few months earlier. Within days, there was a proliferation of UPI apps – at peak, a Play Store search for “UPI” yielded 23 apps. The average citizen was thoroughly confused about which UPI app they should download. Realizing that the chaos could torpedo #CashlessIndia – the Twitter hashtag for the move to digital payments in India – NPCI swung into action and released a single UPI app. Called BHIM, the app could be linked to accounts in any one of dozens of participating banks. Customers of all banks now got one single UPI app to download, install and use. End of confusion. Start of adoption.

BHIM was launched in 45 days.

Memory serves, development of the equivalent PayM app in UK took almost a year (and that excludes time spent before the order was placed on the selected vendor). After seeing just the RFP timelines of NPA, I'm not surprised why PayM took so long!

On a side note, NPA is a hot topic in India nowadays, just that it stands for "Non Productive Assets" aka delinquent outstandings of banks. Hope UK's NPA turns out to be more productive!

Great post. PayTM comes readily to mind as a finserv/fintech company that (in my assessment) makes heavy use of behavioral sciences. The largest mobile wallet in India has designed its app that resonates very well with human behavior towards payment apps: People want security by intent and convenience by action. It provides all the necessary security assurances and attracts customers. Once they start using the app, it knows it's very painful to enter a 8 character password on a smartphone virtual keyboard to make payments multiple times a day. In line with that, the sign out button is buried deep inside the app. As a result, 99% of PayTM users - who are Indians and are otherwise reputed to be obsessed with security - make payments without entering a password because they're always logged in!

All these things from PSD2 are nice but they're not of much use for a bank customer when banks / mainstream media warn them about data breaches and urge them to exercise cautious while sharing their data with TPPs.

Even the author of this post doesn't seem to be impressed with these measures since he clearly sees a risk in "handing over your log-in details". Ditto me. As I pointed out here, "as a bank customer, all I know is, if I give consent, someone other than me will be able to get into my bank account." and no amount of assurance will assuage my concerns of unauthorized access. If and when my account is hacked, I doubt if I can turn to EU - even Donald Rumsfeld didn't know what number to dial if he wanted to talk to EU. Especially when my bank warned me in advance.

End of the day, if I share my credentials, it will only be because I get a compelling value proposition and not because of any PSD2 clauses.

When comes the day when people finally understand the difference between technology and solution for a business problem / compelling value proposition? If I need to share my credentials with a third party app under PSD2, why do I need Open Banking? I could've got all the functionality touted by Open Banking via MINT et al for the whole of the past decade. For that matter, why do third party apps need Open Banking? They can happily operate like MINT et al without the need for any regulation.

I've found the app that locks the car for delayed loan repayment!

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https://thefinancialbrand.com/76228/best-global-innovations-banking-2018/2/

In an effort to enable more consumers to own a car (which translates to a better potential for meaningful employment), Shinhan Bank Japan leveraged internet of things (IOT) and GPS technology to limit risk of loan default. This gold winning innovation for social, sustainable and responsible banking involves installing an IOT device in a newly financed car that can identify the location of the car and deactivate the engine if a customer repayment falls overdue. In this way the bank limits its risk and expands the universe of consumers who can qualify for a loan.

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I may think this app is dystopian but it has won an innovation award for the bank that has developed it!!

Great post. Totally consistent with how technology has generally been positioned - as a way to stop doing mundane tasks and start doing creative, value-added work: Roti making = mundane task; Curry making = creative, value-added work. There's one implicit thing that worked to your advantage in your personal example: The person who could stop doing mundane tasks is also the person who could do creative, value-added work after technology is introduced. That could be a challenge in some enterprise scenarios.