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End of the day, you either ask for permission or seek forgiveness (if you're caught). The other day, Simple's CEO Josh Reich said in a Slate interview that Simple chose the former approach whereas many other fintechs (e.g. PayPal) chose the latter approach. Without advocating one approach over the other, there's a strong correlation between the latter approach and success of startups, particularly in regulated industries, as I highlighted in Fintechs Need Marketers And Lobbyists, Not Lawyers.

@James Piggot: 

Joseph Heller wrote decades ago in his bestseller Picture This, “‘Aristotle Contemplating The Bust of Homer’ is the most valuable painting because it’s the most costly painting; it’s the most costly painting because it’s the most valuable painting”. He was referring to the Rembrandt masterpiece that was the first painting in the world to sell for more than a million dollars.

Bottomline is, valuation is entirely between buyer and seller. As long as somebody is willing to buy shares of a startup at a certain valuation, it’s immaterial what third parties think about the valuation. That said, they say, valuation is always based on future expectations undergirded by past performance and not past performance itself. Also, 0.5M merchants is not small.

@FinextraMember: From time to time, we hear many pundits calling Europe a digital colony of USA. In the aftermath of Walmart's acquisition of Flipkart in India, they've been giving their unsolicited advice on how India can / should avoid becoming another US digital colony. Time will tell whether OB / PSD2 will be able to reverse the trend in Europe.

Totally agree, at least for Query part of the Query-Request-Complaint customer contact framework that I highlighted in Can Chatbots Replace Humans? 

I believe chatbot, and, by extension, "Alexa Banking", has the potential to upend the status quo of digital banking channels for at least two reasons: 

1. With all current digital channels, user has to understand system. With chatbot, system understands user.
2. With Alexa Banking, banking can be done in the background, thereby enabling users to treat banking as a chore that it often really is.

As with PFM / MoMMA, I expect a vibrant debate between bank chatbot and (PSD2-powered) third-party chatbot in the forseeable future.

Good question but, as long as the small fish is VC-funded, its raison d'être is to get swallowed by the big fish. As I highlighted in a slightly different but still relevant context elsewhere on Finextra, consumers are naive if they expect the fintech movement to make any difference in traditional FI's behavior.

@Ian Ogilvie:

True dat, LOL. I'm of course assuming that "present company excluded" clause is applicable when we talk of consultants and suppliers and gold rush advice providers:) That said, banks have a huge potential to attract net new mobile traffic for electronic stock trading. Ever since I signed up for eTrading in circa 2000, I haven't ever gone back to a human stockbroker. IMO, eTrading has arguably the strongest value proposition of all the digital offerings launched by banks during this period. But, perhaps due to inadequate focus or lack of marketing or whatever, it just hasn't reached its full potential in terms of consumer adoption.

@Paul Vieros:

TY for your comment. I Googled "Banking Royal Commission" and the first result was "The real problem with royal commissions" (http://ow.ly/sZsr30k0iv2).

Should I bother to read this article?:)

My bank (in India) supports unlimited field length for IMPS payments but supports only a limited field length for NEFT payments. The recipient of a NEFT payment receives the sender name and account number whereas the recipient of an IMPS payment does not. Take FPS in UK. While the scheme sets stringent SLAs on communications between sender and receiver banks, the nature of communication to sender and receiver - who IMO are the two most important stakeholders in a payment transaction - is not stipulated by the scheme. According to the FPS website, “Once the payment has been made, a confirmation message will always be sent between banks. Each sending bank will decide how this confirmation will be made available to its own customer.”

Based on my exposure to martech, Salesforce has not set any industry-standard. It has created a single-company, proprietary platform - Force.com - into which other products may plug in if they wish to. The other products similarly need to develop different connectors to integrate with SFDC competitors like SugarCRM, Oracle CRM, SAP CRM, etc. I'd be happy to be corrected if my understanding is wrong.

TBH, uniformity of APIs is a pipedream for the entire banking industry even in one country, let alone across all countries in Europe. 

In any case, the point is moot in the aftermath of the FB-CA fracas. For it to gain mainstream adoption, Open Banking Needs A Blockchain Boost.

From my work with banks on customer journey, I completely agree that onboarding is crucial for brand image and customer acquisition. However, at the stage of onboarding, the relationship between the customer and bank has barely started. So, from where does a bank obtain all the data you've mentioned for carrying out analytics? Let's also not forget that, according to the popular fintech narrative, banks are allegedly doing nothing with the mountains of data they already have on exsiting customers for years.

I've heard of popular cryptowallets charging as high as 15% fees for BTC-to-ETH transfers. I find it extremely hard to believe that a Fiat1-to-Crypto-Fiat2 transfer will be 40-70% cheaper than a Fiat1-to-Fiat2 transfer. But I tip my hat to these crypto companies for their phenomenal ability to spread their outlandish claims far and wide.