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The currently unraveling $1.8B fraud at India's Punjab National Bank happened entirely via SWIFT, the mother of all electronic payment methods.

Congratulations Australia, only 8 years later and 950 million dollars costlier than India. 

In an era where banks have been fined billions for enabling money laundering via EFT, and cryptocurrencies facilitate crime totally electronically - blaming cash for crime is totally reality-defying. 

Perfect use case for Blockchain. Not because Centralized Escrow Apps are broken. But because Blockchain dApps can deliver lower operating costs. Just as in the case of Flight Delay Insurance.

@AlexKreger:

This disruption thingy is not new. It has been talked about for the past several years. However, it hasn't come anywhere close to happening. Traditional finserv continues to be the most profitable industry in FORTUNE 500. Actually, what has happened in reality is, those who chanted the disruption mantra have changed their tune and have started chanting the partnership mantra for the last 2-3 years. Against that backdrop, the claim that time will put anything in place is totally disconnected from ground realities and is something that Finextra Readers are only too aware of, which is what I want to insistently (sic) prove.

If only people switched from Google to any one of half a dozen other search engines with the click of a mouse, Google wouldn't be facing (IMO unfair) charges of monopoly. Against that backdrop of actual consumer behavior in a product category where switching providers is totally frictionless, the claim "changing banks is a click away" utterly defies reality. ICYMI, according to the old adage, "Switching banks is more painful than root canal surgery".

What "age of disruption"? Have you missed all the news of how Moven, Dwolla and dozens of other wannabe-bank disruptors realized that it's virtually impossible for startups to disrupt banks and changed their tune to fintech-bank partnership 2-3 years ago??

According to a recent Cornerstone Advisors study, (a) Millennials show as much preference for MegaBanks as other generations (b) Digital Banks have only 1% market share (c) Megabanks have digital technology that works (d) And just because something comes from a fintech startup, that doesn't mean it works, or is better than what's already out there.

Sorry but your article is many years too late.

Sounds more like riffraff. GiffGaff is trying to do stuff which PFMs and MoMMAs have been trying to do for ages without much consumer adoption. GiffGaff should first make telephone statements simple before venturing into bank account statements. Innovative Fintechs Don’t Need No PSD2 Regulation

@RamdasNarayanan:

TY for your kind words.

As I said in this post, I don't buy the trust aspect of Blockchain. Like you, even I'm struggling to understand the mining and verification aspects of BC. I've not been hands on with hardware / infra part of IT for a long time but I've come across a couple of examples of ACTIVE:ACTIVE configuration for ops/txn data in the recent past, so I think it's possible.

@VishwanathThanalapatti: No. The said ecommerce website or ePG are looking over my shoulder while I enter my username and password on my bank website. They don't need sophisticated hacking skills to steal my creds.