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Good luck to Wagestream but when I read what sounds like its founding premise - "A major reason for so many people struggling towards the end of the month is that the vast majority of Brits - unlike Americans - are paid monthly" - I've to wonder. After all, payday lending is big business in the US. 

Just calling it "bank" would also suffice:)

@Ramdas Narayanan:

TY for your kind words. My summary has hardly a dozen words but it took me nearly a dozen years of observation to feel confident enough to put it out in the public domain!

On a side note, you should see the reaction of people when I point out the disconnect between intent and action to some of them. They always come up with some explanation for why their action is indeed secure and not driven by convenience and why there's really no disconnect. Some day, I'll write a post on that. 

If "Intelligent Friction" is an oxymoron, "Bad Friction" is a redundancy:)

Between explicit friction (e.g. enter OTP received via SMS) and implicit friction (e.g. risk based extra step performed in the backend without user intervention), I'd prefer implicit friction. But, even there, I've observed that the extra implicit step causes inconsistent CX (e.g. longer response time), which can risk a drop in conversion rate. Thing is, on that specific instance, people may keep trying again and again until the payment succeeds but the experience leaves a mark on their subconscious, which makes them shun that mode of digital payment in future (and go back to cash or check).

In a security-paranoid country like India, when you ask people, they will say, they want security above all; but, in actual practice, 95% of the customers of PayTM, India's #1 mobile wallet, never log out of their app and make payments without entering a single userid or password. Perhaps learning from that, my go-to mobile wallet PayZapp now asks me to confirm whether I really want to log out of the app after completing my payment. In the past, PayZapp would log me out automatically after a minute of no activity (which meant, I'd have to enter a 6-digit PIN to re-open the app the next time). After closely observing consumer behavior on digital payments for nearly a decade, I've come to the conclusion that security always wins when it comes to intent but frictionless always wins when it comes to action.

No no no. IT IS about eliminating friction in payments for digital payments to go mainstream. Sorry but Intelligent Friction sounds like an oxymoron to me. Entry of PIN or whatever extra *explicit* steps kill conversion rate. Loss of revenue as a result is >> cost of disruption associated with fraud and disputed claims. Mitigating Fraud Does Not Pay The Bills even if I say so myself. We've learned this lesson the hard way in a security-paranoid country like India. Would hate to see the adoption of digital payments get stunted by additional friction.

Actually, my question pertains to time of purchase, not claim. Besides, in these two implementations of Blockchain-based flight delay insurance, I, as a policyholder, DON'T submit a claim.

What I struggle to understand is who are the various parties that are in agreement in a distributed architecture. Who decides who is a party and who is not?  For example, when I buy a flight delay insurance policy on AXA Fizzy or Atlast Etherisc - more in Flight Delay Insurance - Why Blockchain? - am I one of those "parties"? Who decides whether I am or I am not?

"across the new bank's *branch* and online channels."

If this new bank has a branch, how is it a digital bank?

"For example, the company says that its technology makes it possible to determine when a machine is likely to fail, prompting firms to conduct maintenance to ensure that this does not happen." I really wonder what's new. Over 30 years ago, highly critical factory equipment like DG sets would be mounted on pads. Sensors placed in the pad woud relay the vibration level to a central monitoring station where a combination of men and software predicted when a DG set would fail based on mapping its vibration level vis-a-vis control charts for that model. 

Welcome back @AlexanderPeschkoff!

After reading this article in FORTUNE, it looks like ICE / Bakkt plans to strip Bitcoin of almost all of its unique features in order to bring it into the mainstream market. Thing is, I'm quite sure this strategy will work. Decentralized architecture always sounds romantic but centralized architecture always seems to win in the end. We saw it with ERP before. I'm sure we'll see it again with BTC now.