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@Souvik Das: 

TY for your reply.

In a recent interview with SLATE, the exiting CEO of Simple, arguably the most successful neobank, noted, "There’s a lot more competition out there, but the reality is that most millennials, like most Americans, bank at the top four banks."

Now, according to you, an overwhelming majority (80%) of Monzo customers uses a traditional bank for its primary banking needs. 

Any idea why the performance of neobanks has been so underwhelming? Is it because 100% digital onboarding has been overrated OR because customers do want brick-and-mortar presence of an institution they trust their money with OR something else? 

LOL not so long ago these neobanks and challenger banks used to claim that mobile wallet to replace plastic cards was innovative. Now they're claiming that changing the orientation of plastic card from landscape to portrait mode as innovative! At least, they're finally on the right track!!

As long as a Bank even uses a 20 year old CBS, it's technically possible to get a Single Customer View and fetch and prefill details of all products from that bank owned by a given customer. If that's not happening today, the reasons are as much about technology as business. Due to customer preference, privacy, politics and other business reasons, customer info - and a lot of other info - are not shared across different SBUs of any large company, including a Bank. Deep Learning won't help.

Media wants to be tech; tech wants to be finserv; in this brave new world, everybody wants to get into everybody else's business. As a result, companies are a bit wary about sharing their customer info with third parties. Not surprisingly, companies take the extra efforts to do KYC themselves. We saw this with India's largest ride share company Ola for its Ola Wallet and with all prepaid mobile wallets for whom full KYC became mandatory a couple of months ago. Unsurprisingly, bank-provided KYC as a service / e-identity initiatives have not taken off in a big way despite people talking about their advantages for quite a while.

Talking about potential to make money by providing API access - or INBOUND as you call it - any idea how much revenues Google earns by providing Google Maps API access to Uber, Grab, Lyft, PostMate, DoorDash, Dunzo and dozens of other rideshare and delivery companies?

Nice post. Do you know of any research around the persona of the customer who prefers to open a new bank account 100% digitally? More than demographics, I'm interested in usage pattern viz. (1) Is it their first ever bank account? (2) Does their paycheck go into that account? (3) How far is the nearest branch from their home / office?  

Sweden is definitely an outlier. Cash in circulation is rising in many other countries. That said, the growth of cash can be kept in check if payment stakeholders did what it takes To Really Kill Cash and adopted these Five Ways To Boost Credit Card Use. 

Unlike ransomware that exhorts money from the victim and is clearly a crime, cryptomining just uses up a some extra processing power of the victim's computer - arguably less than that used up by a legal activity like script-laden programmatic advertising. Maybe it's only me but cryptomining doesn't sound too criminal.

@Bill Trueman:

One day, it'll all come down to limitations of ISO 8587 v. ISO 20022 and differences in implementation in different parts of the world but I think we're not there yet. As of now, the problem seems to lie with incompleteness / vagueness of specs and that's applicable virtually all over the world. We're seeing this in Open Banking, with specs on access method, consent type still undecided. We're also seeing this in FPS. Like I quoted from FPS website in PSA: Insist On Receipt When You Pay By NEFT And FPS, "Once the payment has been made, ... Each sending bank will decide how this confirmation will be made available to its own customer." With total ambiguity around such a crucial element of the transaction, it's not surprising that different customers have different levels of comfort w.r.t. security of FPS, NEFT and other A2A PUSH MOPs.

On a side note, any idea what's the status of the Enhanced Remittance initiative in your part of the world?

Personally, I have a big problem with PUSH payments: Lack of receipt by default. PSA: Insist On Receipt When You Pay By NEFT And FPS. Unless this problem is addressed and redressed, I'll find PUSH insecure and will prefer card payments (PULL). Either way, it's Pay By Bank:)

"It would however enable those retailers to become for competitive as the margins they currently pay to the major card schemes could (in part or in full) be passed on to their customers." This is highly delusional. Retailers already incur less cost on debit card than credit card payments. How many retailers pass on the benefit by charing a lower price to customers paying by debit card? Replace debit card in the above statement with cash and the question still remains. OTOH, when the V/MC removed the No-Surcharge rule, several merchants slapped 7.5% surcharge even though they incurred only 2% MDR. End of the day, virtually every industry is greedy. Banks act out their greed with sophistication and remain the most profitable industry. Retailers act out their greed crudely and remain one of the least profitable industries.