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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!

@TapanAgarwal:

You've hit the the nail on the head. The excellent spec'cing of electronic components is what I meant by catalog.

That said, I'd be remiss if I failed to mention the drive towards software cataloging by GITHUB et al. Despite such initiatives, Open Source movement presents another source of difference between software and other industries. I pay $X for 12μF capacitor, plug it into my PCB circuit, and forget about it. OTOH, even if I totally trust a software component on GITHUB and use it in my system, OSF terms may preclude public acknowledgment of such assembly process of developing a software system. While the open source component itself is free of license, OSF imposes conditions of redistribution of modified code back in the open source community. Redistribution of modified code is not always easy. There could be IP issues involved. After reading Flash Boys, I've learned that there could even be outright stealing involved. In this book about algo trading Michael Lewis references a top tier investment bank that brazenly uses open source code in its proprietary software and doesn't contribute anything back to the open source community. While it's a major violation of OSF rules, life goes on. If a company is unwilling / unable to conform to OSF rules, it could very well be assembling software systems from open source components without announcing it publicly.

As a result, it's quite likely that, whatever little reuse of components is happening in software systems, we may never know all about it.

@ErikBogaerts:

A capacitor in a PCB is a commodity. Unlike software, which is positioned by IT vendors, and accepted by customers, as providing competitive advantage to their owner. Even if s/he wants to, a PCB designer can't design a capacitor from ground up. Unlike software system designers who can theoretically - if not also practically - build most components from scratch and, more importantly, refuse to accept code written by others on faith. I used "emotional attachment" as a catch-all phrase to describe these characteristics of software systems. Protectionism is an equally valid expression.

Because suppliers position enterprise software as providing competitive advantage, most owners of enterprise systems think of them as trade secret. As a result, it's impractical to expect any transparency and openness in this realm. Therefore, I'm not sure when and if such a catalog / marketplace will become a reality in enterprise software building blocks. Ergo, it might forever be an aspiration to build a software system by assembling components from a reusable library.

At least they can't blame the pet whipping boy, legacy systems, for this cock up!