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Doubt if a mobile app would matter much - a banker in Canary Wharf once told me she'd be destitute if she depended on her pension:)

Jokes apart, when I was in UK, mobile apps were still new. But, every month, my payslip would display the monthly pension contribution and cumulative pension balance to date. I did find that useful to keep a track of my pension, at least once a month. Instead of telling me to eschew that $5.00 coffee and put it away in pension, I like Acorn PFM's approach better: For every $5.00 coffee you buy - or any other extravagant expense you incur - the app threatens to put away some money in another account, which can be configured for pension. So, whether you control your spendthrift behavior or not, you'll have more money in your pension account!

@MattScott: TY for the figures. On a side note, when I published Why Does Cash Still Rule Ecommerce In India? last year, I strongly doubted if any Issuer / Acquirer in India had >90% availability! I'm sure the uptime has increased in the interim period since card payment success rates have gone up from the 60% figure prevailing at the time.

Just stumbled onto this TC article: AWS launches a cheaper single-zone version of its S3 storage service.

Two takeaways:

1. Max. availability possible for single-zone is 99.5%
2. 99.5% availability means downtime of 1-2 days / year.

This is true for AWS. Can anyone enlighten whether the same is true for other infra?

Millions of dollars are not enough for ACTIVE:ACTIVE configuration required to deliver Five 9 uptime. For a Top 10 global bank, the budget for Five 9s for its payment hub alone ran into a couple of tens of millions of dollars. In all likelihood, the cost for a megabank to achieve Five 9s for the entire IT landscape including CBS would be ~$100M. While talking about high uptime, it's customary to point to Google, Amazon and Facebook. I read somewhere that their total infra cost runs into billions of dollars.

@JoelHartshorn: Do you know any cross-border payment method that even does only clearing in 10 minutes? Re. RIPPLE, is it for Fiat-to-Fiat or Crypto-to-Crypto?

Yo Fintechs, are you listening?

HSBC is a traditional bank, PayPal is a traditional fincumbent, they'll always be self-centered. By "making payments simpler, secure and more convenient", they obviously expect merchants to pay a premium.

Why don't you fulfill Anonymous Finextra Member's wish? You're supposed to change the world and be highly customer-centric, so this should be right up your alley.

Can we finally hope to come across some Fintechs That Will Sell What Consumers Want To Buy?

@FinextraMember: Are you aware of any product that does a cross-border payment originating from the USA in less than 10 minutes?

@AndyBrown: There's no need to fund - i.e. prefund - FPS, NEFT, Boku, Zong, etc. All these Methods of Payments pull out money from current account on the fly. Not sure if and why you believe otherwise. As for setting up a payment vehicle, (a) Paying by one Open Banking product and not another will require some amount of setting up of the former (b) The other MOPs are incumbent and already enjoy adoption. Even if setting up of an Open Banking product requires less effort than setting up of incumbent MOPs, the latter is a sunk effort, so the challenge for Open Banking product is to provide enough reason for consumers to ditch the incumbent MOPs. Greater ease of adoption of Open Banking products - assuming it's true - is not very relevant. 

#MeToo.

Credit card has been around for 50+ years. During this period, many wannabe credit card killer alternatives have sprouted up e.g. Account-to-Account EFTs (e.g. FPS, NEFT, PayM, Venmo, Dwolla), GenY Mobile Payments (e.g. Boku, Zong), Pay Later Payments (e.g. Bill Me Later, Klarna), etc. However, none of them has spelled the end of credit card payments. In fact, some of them have died by now and others have had to pivot from Alternate / TELCO to credit card rails to ensure their own survival.

I've long attributed the lackluster performance of these alternative payments to a combination of their weak value proposition and disadvantages for existing credit card users viz. no rewards, no deferred payment, zero fraud protection, exposure of bank account, non-repudiation, lack of merchant receipt, etc. Offering a lower MDR to merchants alone is not sufficient to dislodge a strong incumbent like credit card (and some alternative payments like GenY Mobile Payments didn't even do that). 

The ability of Open Banking payment products to dent credit card payments in any significant manner depends largely on how they overcome the downsides of their alternative payment predecessors.