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Unfortunately, Samsung Pay is too late for India. Its USP of being able to work on existing card swipe machines is passé amidst India's move to POS-less regime via PayTM, mVisa and BharatQR, all of which use QR code.

Ooops, "Markets reacted furiously to the news, wiping EUR1 billion off its valuation as the stock price tumbled by nearly a quarter."

Perhaps the harshest manifestation of my belief that  

Mitigating Fraud Does Not Pay The Bills

I think Product is another important critical success factor for Challenger Banks.

If they launch, for example, a P2P loan product targeted at SMEs, no-file and thin-file market segments, they will quickly make inroads into segments that traditional banks have shunned. If they are able to claw their way up from there, they could disrupt traditional banks in the classical-Christensen mold. But as long as they just offer the same old checking account and debit card, no matter what their business model or CX, it will hardly make any difference to the mainstream market. They will win some customers from the Innovator and Early Adopter segments of the market but they will face a huge challenge in crossing the chasm to the mainstream market.

IMO, Technology per se does not matter. How much money they can pay for Technology is what really matters. The same AWS will give varying levels of uptime depending upon how much you pay for it e.g. $100X will get you Backup & Five-9 uptime but $50X will probably get you no Backup and only 98% uptime.

That takes us back to Investment, which is perhaps the most important determinant of success of Challenger Banks.

Looks like a compelling adoption of Deep Linking technology for an everyday use case. I predict that it will go mainstream if it works even on a phone that doesn't have the said bank's mobile banking app. Good luck to PayKey.

For at least a decade, we've been hearing about the next great security technology that will crack the Holy Grail of convenience versus security. Hasn't happened in the last 10 years. Doubt if it will ever happen unless we drastically change the way we think about security technologies. In simple terms, the security challenge is as follows: User wants easy access to her funding source to make a payment. User wants others to have absolutely no access to her funding source to make a payment. The "system" needs to figure out whether user is the legitimate owner of the funding source (and accordingly offer me easy access to her) or not the legitimate owner of the funding (and deny access to her). But the system can't see the user physically and can't figure out whether she is genuine or not. The way current security technologies are designed, the only way Therefore, the system can do what's expected of it is to subject all users to the same degree of gatekeeping aka security, which causes inconvenience. I somehow think this Holy Grail will be cracked only when we think beyond authentication factors and come up with a technology that provides a different paradigm of presence to the system.

@NicholasRoi: 

And, as I've pointed out in my latest blog post Innovative Fintechs Don’t Need No PSD2 Regulation, it's a bad idea for fintechs to depend on regulators.

PSD2 mandates that banks share proprietary customer info with third parties to drive innovation. I'd like to see an equivalent regulation that mandates that Apple share NFC with third parties to drive innovation.

Totally agree. I'd add that it'd help if it was a benevolent dictator. In some ways, entrusting systems to PaaS providers is a move in this direction. The way Amazon, Google et al behave, sometimes you wonder if they're dictators.

On a side note, when I read your line "In an ideal world, financial services will have moved away from mainframes by that point but if not, they need to ensure that the necessary skills are still present within the business.", I was reminded of the opening paragraph of my blog post 6 Reasons Why Banks Can't Transform Legacy Applications 

"During a meeting with the CIO of a Top 5 bank in Germany, I was introduced to a lady who was retiring that same weekend. The CIO averred that she was the last employee in the bank's IT department who knew the nitty-gritty of a certain mainframe application."

Neobanks, Roboadvisors and a few other category of fintechs depend on access to customer information from traditional banks / brokerages / stock exchanges and the ability to execute functionality on behalf of customers on these incumbent entities. If an incumbent cuts off this access, such fintechs would die instantly. To me that's one of the biggest barriers to fintech investments.

It could be argued that regulation will disallow incumbents from cutting off access to fintechs. But, in the event of a dispute, incumbents can easily muddy the waters by pointing out the numerous instances when LinkedIn, Twitter and other pure-play Internet companies have (a) totally cut off access to third party services or (b) tweaked their APIs in such a way that many third party services shut down by themselves because they don't have the resources to modify their applications to conform to the new API specs.

I too used linear regression five years ago and came up with the result that end of cash is 190 years away. The Death Of Cash Is At Least 190 Years Away. But if a casino says cash will be dead in 2043, we have to believe it - as they say, the house always wins.

Actually, cash can be killed even earlier - all it will take is demonetization of currency notes. 

LOL @MelvinHaskins but I think we'll be using flying cars before 2043; and, by 2043, Mars residence won't be an option because we'd have run out of space on Earth!