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As somebody said, most inventions sounded like harebrained ideas at the time they were announced. I hope coworking space on intercity trains is one of them. OTOH, "free office facilities for entrepreneurs" is a no-brainer - I'm not at all surprised that it proved so popular that Idea Bank had to close this facility for non-customers.

Why banks, every one of my service providers has a mobile app to which I can ask such and other questions via voice / hand gesture / thought waves and other interfaces. How successfully they answer I cannot say. Whoa, the future is already here.

None of my current 3 banks uses IBM mainframes. Their CBS run on open Unix + Oracle systems.

I grapple nearly everyday with questions like "What was the last payment I made to my ad agency?", "When did I last repay a loan?", etc. I thought it would be a piece of cake to find answers to such questions by using simple search functionality on my online banking portal. But no such luck - I haven't found this feature on any of my bank's portals. Maybe it requires AI. Hope I'll get this feature in the future of banking.

Leading lists like FORTUNE 500 use revenue to rank companies. On that count, MNOs still tower over OTT players. OTT players may have taken away voice revenue from MNOs but they added huge data revenues to MNOs. OTT players may enjoy greater share of buzz but, when it comes to hard knuckle financial metrics like revenues and profits, it's funny that the MNOs who were supposed to have lost revenues are still way ahead of OTTs, many of whom don't even exist independently today.

The analogy with banks is flawed. MNOs provided infrastructure (e.g. data) and product (e.g. voice). OTTs used the infra and provided the same product that could compete with MNOs. Thus they competed with MNOs.

Banks provide infrastructure (e.g. card rails) and product (e.g. credit card). Fintechs benefiting from PSD2 provide uberproduct (e.g. money management) but they don't provide the product to compete with banks. To claim that fintechs would result in retail banks becoming utility providers is completely flawed. It's like saying customers using SAP COGNOS won't need SAP ERP any more.

Fintechs will dent retail banking even less than OTTs dented MNOs. 

Let's also not forget that fintechs are surviving on VC capital, which in turn comes from LPs who are inevitably finserv giants.

Technology standards help everyone reach a certain level. Leaders won't be leaders if they stuck to standards and stayed on par with the others in their industry. They will use technology to gain competitive advantage. While standards do serve a certain purpose, it's naive to expect any single open standard to achieve ubiquituous adoption. Through the decades, I've seen multiple open standards emerge in any given space and vie for adoption e.g. TCP/IP v. ISO/OSI, BSD v. AT&T Unix, etc. The only standards that have managed to achieve majority adoption are the proprietary ones e.g. MS DOS, Windows, etc. I see the same story repeating with Blockchain. 

LOL, stranger things have happened:)

I've never belonged to the "branch is dead" brigade but, even I find it hard to believe that "71% of all bank customers visited the branch an average of 14 times in the last year". Too early to say but I suspect that the report uses "#2. Strategic Silence" method of lying with Big Data that I described in How To Lie With Big Data. If we probe deeper, we might find the truth unraveling as follows: "71% of all branch-visiting customers visited a branch 14 times last year", which is very different from the reported statement.

I don't know what the latest payment fraud figures but I doubt if they're more than 5%.

"The more walls you throw up to keep yourself guarded, the less likely you are to fall victim to data theft." This affects <5% of customers, if my above assumption is right. 

OTOH, the more walls you erect to keep yourself guarded, the more friction you face and the less likely you are to use the payment method. This affects 100% of customers. Why Does Cash Still Rule Ecommerce In India?

A bank disabling payment functionality? Especially when a system outage prevents money from being tranferred out of the bank?? No chance!!! #FloatIncome.