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For some reason, I saw a link to this article on my Twitter Timeline today. I clicked thru' and discovered that it's dated 20 Jan 2016. I don't remember the article although I see my comment on it. A BTC was worth ~USD 800 when this article was published (Source: BI) versus USD 4110 USD today.

Enough proof that hype works.

Aadhaar UID in India definitely has helped many people in India get the ID required to qualify for a bank account. However, whether they actually get a bank account or not depends upon whether the bank wants to give them a bank account. Until the government mandated the no-frills PMJDY bank account, very few of these newly-ID'd people got a bank account. While they've now got a PMJDY bank account, for reasons I highlighted in Calling B.S On Banking The Unbanked, moneylenders and blade companies are still their first port of call of such - and many more people - when they need a loan or wish to make a fixed deposit. And, quite frankly, I haven't seen much empirical evidence showing that banking the unbanked alone has led to upward mobility.

"editorail"? I've heard of MonoRail, EuRail, etc. but what's EditoRail?

Spell check may be equally useful for Finextra Commenters:)

Money quote: When people behave like robots, they will be replaced by robots behaving like people.

This is one of the most powerful points to support an affirmative answer to the question I raised in Can Chatbots Replace Humans?

I tend to agree. As I highlighted in Can Chatbots Replace Humans?, chatbots can replace humans for Query and Request elements of Customer Service. As of now, they lag humans in Complaint but I see chatbots overtaking humans even in that element of Customer Service in the next 4-5 years.

@Michael Kyritsis:

Okay, I take that as a NO on public cloud!

This is the first time I'm hearing that Amazon / Microsoft can provide a datacenter. In that case, it's a no-brainer that a given company can do whatever it wants on its dedicated datacenter to make some systems compliant with X reg and some other systems compliant with Y certification. My question was specifically related to public cloud and was based on the assumption that Amazon / Microsoft will find datacenter to be the antithesis of their public cloud offering. 

There are others on Finextra who make a strong case for a company to move its existing systems to public cloud rather than replace them with SAAS e.g. https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=14425. So, I guess, it's different strokes for different folks!

Knowing and doing are two different things, especially when it comes to a sensitive area like retail banking. Banks Will Know Chipotle Is Going Bankrupt Before Chipotle.

In any case, when I use my credit card for air ticket booking, I do get approached for travel insurance and hotel booking. Just that my OTA does this. Ditto in your Amazon example. If I buy these products, I use the same credit card. The bank earns extra interchange revenue. What difference does it make to me or the bank as to who initiates the Next Best Offer? OTOH, I'd think the bank is being very smart by leaving the OTA to do all the heavy lifting of crunching the data and stepping in only to pocket the revenues. 

Not surprisingly, banking is the most profitable sector and Ecommerce is the least profitable sector in FORTUNE 500.

"In India, 56% of consumers saying they pay with a smartphone regularly".

56% of the population of India doesn't even have a smartphone. There are 300M smartphones in India (source), which is 25% of the population of 1.2B people. It's highly plausible that 56% of that 25% i.e. 14% pays with smartphone regularly.

The sentence "In India, 14% of consumers saying they pay with smartphone regularly" doesn't support the basic claim made by the report, so we see "strategic silence" with numbers. I'll file this under yet another exhibit for the use of method #2 of lying with Big Data.

Coincidentally, India's largest mobile wallet, PayTM, which has around 200M mobile wallet users, just launched a plastic debit card recently! 

Blockchain transactions are supposed to be immutable. How will the startups return the money, even if they wanted to?

I guess it's only of academic interest whether the acquisition value was £70M or £75M.