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Blockchain is just the solution for consent. Not just of the nature handled by LegalFlings app 😉 but also for the consent involved in sharing of banking data with third parties under Open Banking.

When you have half a product across one and a half channels, it's not so hard to provide a seamless cross-product, cross-channel experience. It's only when the Starlings and Monzos of the world go beyond their checking account / PFM offerings to become full-service banks that the rubber will hit the road. Only then will they realize that a single platform is not such a great advantage as it's made out to be. 

Banks shouldn't get diverted by that noise. After all, they've operated multiple platforms on different technologies for decades and have still provided cross-channel products / services e.g. (1) ATM cash withdrawal via Java ATM Switch talking to Mainframe Core System (2) Mobile Banking via Android App talking to God-knows how many diverse systems at the middle and backend. It's not a big deal for them to support QRC ATM cash withdrawal via Mobile Banking or Instant Credit at POS - in fact, I know some who already do.

To me, merely providing cross-product, cross-channel products / services is neither difficult nor such a big deal from consumer p.o.v. What is difficult and a big deal from consumer p.o.v is delivering good enough UX and CX. And that's equally well a problem on a single product, single platform, single technology stack as on multi product, multi platform, multi technology stacks.

I've been highlighting this for years and, at last, I'm happy to learn from Financial Brand recently that "Remove Friction from Customer Journey" has finally become the #1 imperative of Retail Banks in USA for 2018. Hope retail banks all over the world follow suit.

Frankly, everything else is noise.

Kudos to METRO Bank. Its approach totally resonates with the increasingly omnichannel banking journey preferred by customers. On a side note, for all the predictions of end of swipe and plastic with iPhone 5, iPhone X has come and swipe and plastic happen to be the only physical things in Metro Bank's digital account!

I looked up Raiden Network. It sounds interesting but it seems to be focused only on payments. Would it be useful for executing Smart Contracts off-chain, which is the requirement for Etherisc? 

One more $0.02 on UX: Now that you've confirmed that your actual insurance product is currently not in production, you might want to explore the option of prepopulating the credit card fields on the current Ropsten testnet with the test card so that people don't unnecessarily disclose their real credit card info.

I also looked up your Telegram Channel. You might see me there soon!

@ChristophMussenbrock:

TY for your detailed response.

I tried another transaction today on your dApp: BOM-MUC (maybe to meet you in Munich!). I saw a message to the extent that I was using a demo version on the Ropsten testnet. This message wasn't there during my earlier experiment. However, the test credit card # was there before. I'd tried it and it hadn't worked. Only then I'd entered my real credit card details.

Re. the time taken to mine the transaction: I agree with you that making a customer wait for even a few minutes, let alone hours, is a NO-NO. But taking the transaction "off-chain" - which I perceive as "central server" - may go against the basic ethos of Blockchain of being decentralized.

My $0.02: Execute the transaction "on-chain" but release the user as soon as they hit the Apply button; send them an email later whenever the transaction is executed i.e. written to the Blockchain. I've seen this practice used by many traditional apps / websites for long-lead time actions e.g. Create Archive of Tweets in Twitter, Batch Image Recognition (on some website whose name I now don't remember) and I think it will work for your dApp as well.

As for missing info on your website, that's not a problem: Of the very few dApps I've been able to try so far, yours has the best UX! 

Overall, am I right in understanding that Atlas Etherisc is NOT available on Production as of now?

@RamdasNarayanan: I guess so, too. And your guess is as good as mine! Ironically, Blockchain is supposed to be open, transparent and all that, but we're still just guessing:)

I seriously don't get this. In a capitalistic society, utility companies are for-profit corporations. Shouldn't they be thrilled with the prospect of earning more revenues by selling more units of electricity? How I wish my industry - IT - faced this problem!

900 branches on a baseline of 5900 branches works out to a little over 15%. Assuming that the remaining 5000 branches is the Ideal Branch COunt as I defined in Why Branch And Digital Channels Will Coexist Forever, WF's actual IBCO% is 85%. Looks like my estimate that "IBCO will be around 60% of current branch count" understates banks' need for branches.

@DirkKinvig: Maybe that. Or he's a FLOC - "Fellow of Left Out Club" - and is bracing himself for blowback from customers over "lame" returns on his fund compared to crypto assets. And, going by Twitter, I see that blowback coming soon: There was this guy who was ranting against Robinhood App the other day. His tweet displayed two screenshots side-by-side. One was of Robinhood App showing 10% appreciation of his portfolio of conventional stocks and the other was Coinbase App showing 1000% appreciation of his BTC holdings. 

With due respect, Warren Buffett was also skeptical about the rise of tech stocks in the 1990s and had then admitted in the oughties that he'd missed the tech boom.