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Retailers have been trying their own Pays. According to this BI INTELLIGENCE illustration of different types of e-wallets published by BI, there are more Merchant Wallets than Bank+Tech+Fintech+Network Wallets put together. Just that they're struggling to gain traction.

Just because merchants want to escape dependence on card networks and banks / tech companies doesn't mean consumers would have a compelling reason to adopt Merchant Pays. IMO the time for Merchant Wallets has already run out.

Retailers are greedy. They'll never pass on reductions to consumers. OTOH, when the no-surcharge rule was scrapped, some of them slapped as much as 7.5% surcharge even though they incurred card processing fees of <3%. "Retail is competitive" is a lame counter: Banking is even more competitive. I don't have the figures for UK / Europe but there are >6K banks in USA and not even 1/5th that number of retailers.

"An average of 20% to 40% is the average rate for top 100 banks." "Banks invest from as little as hundred dollars to 20,000 dollars for each customer, they onboard." Can you cite the sources for these claims? 

"We are open to sharing our data with anyone who wants to take part." 

"our data"?

I thought the governing principle of PSD2 / Open Banking is that, all banking data belongs to customers. How come a banker is claiming that it's "our data"?!!!

It looks like mobile even on desktop. So, it's "Mobile Only", not "Mobile First". While I like the mobile experience more now, is there any toggle / switch - like the "Switch to our desktop site" link I see at the bottom of many websites including my company blog - that I can use to restore the former desktop view on a desktop? 

There are many ways to check account balances. But all of them require people to leave their most favorite app! Ergo Facebook Messenger Account Inquiry. 

For a long, long time, retailers have complained to the regulators and courts about high card processing fees but have continued to accept cards shamelessly; and, when card networks repealed the NO SURCHARGE rule, many of them brazenly started charging as high as 7.5% surcharge to customers despite incurring less than 3% interchange fees. This is the first time I'm seeing a retailer actually refusing to accept a card. Kudos to KROGER for adopting the right strategy for driving change in a capitalism. Let's see how its gambit plays out...

FWIW, here's a contrarian take by TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/06/facebook-banking/

I admire Facebook's chutzpah. What's more, it just might work. I can see how millions of customers would readily click the DO IT button following a teaser like "Prevent credit card fraud without leaving your favorite app".

Not only is Blockchain a virtual external drive, it's also a virtual external drive that costs a fraction of existing Dropboxes of the world. As I explained at the end of my blog post entitlted Flight Delay Insurance - Why Blockchain?, Blockchain dApps like Storj and SIA connect billions of underutilized hard disks in a Blockchain-managed storage mesh, thus promising to cut down storage costs drastically compared to centralized external virtual drives like Dropbox.