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@BobLyddon:

From my experience with sales and implementation of FPS at a Top 5 UK Bank, FPS was indeed mandated by a regulator - OFT - just not FCA.

AFAIK, 8 character BIC only identifies a Bank. To transfer funds to a specific account requires mention of a Branch where the account is held. This adds 3 more characters to BIC. Ergo, an actual fund transfer uses a 11 character BIC e.g. HDFCINBBPNE for my account. Notwithstanding that, I agree that BIC isn't as complicated as it's made out to be. SWIFT typically handles B2B and FI-to-FI payments of $M ticket size. When I make payments of that size, I'd actually prefer to use a meticulous system like IBAN and BIC - despite their longer lengths - than a casual and error-prone addressing method like name and risk letting my payment get lose in the "cyberabyss".

While WhatsApp is relatively new, web-based instant messaging tools like ICQ have been around since the late 1990s. If there are so many things wrong with SWIFT, any idea why nobody else has managed to disrupt it even 20 years after availability of open IM technologies?

Online payments in India are subject to 2FA / 3DS. While that has made them more secure, they've also made online payments very rare because they increase friction and multiply risk of failed payments. Ergo COD is very popular. This is a frequent topic of many of my blog posts:  

Why I Went From Card To COD

Mobile OTP: Cyanide Or Caffeine For Online Payments?

Yes, COD indeed has increased cost of operations for etailers and has resulted in their returns going thru' the roof. But, then, COD has created the ecommerce industry in India. Even Amazon and Uber have had to offer it here India (unlike in any other market AFAIK).

So, I'd call COD a "nightmare embedded in a very sweet dream" for etailers in India!

As an Indian who stands to benefit from rapid growth of ecommerce in India, this was music to my ears. Until I read that COD is 22% - then it all turned to cacaphony. The actual COD % in ecommerce in India was 60% in 2015. In the first 6 months of 2016, it has actually gone up to 70% (Source). But, of course, this shouldn't stop a company that benefits from digital payments from singing the tune about COD falling to 9% by 2020.

When a British celebrity with a £26M bank balance didn't merit personalized service, it's high time Private Wealth Management got disrupted by robo-advisors.

http://qwt.io/s_ketharaman/Gfqb

On a side note, justifying human financial advisors on the ground that US-based robo-advisors are "not 'consistent with the security requirements' of most Swiss clients" is quite lame. Traditional suppliers of financial tech to banking, including a former employer of mine, have found perfectly legal ways to work around such constraints over a decade ago. Once the fintech valuation froth fizzles and the new-age fintechs are forced to shed their cowboy styles and get serious about facing the regulatory realities in the banking industry, they will, too.

The first robo-advisor I came across was Covestor in 2007. That was followed by KaChing a couple of years later. Personally, ever since I went online for stock trading in the late '1990s followed by online financial investments (IPO, bonds, etc.) in the early 2000s, I've never felt the need for a human stock broker / financial advisor. I just can't understand why the aforementioned pioneering robo-advisors didn't take off and why there are still doubts being expressed about the current crop of robo-advisors.

There are a rising number of new-age lending fintechs who have been using new-age metrics computed from Big Data analysis of social graph, income v. expenses, social media posts, etc. They've been pooh-poohing credit score as an old-fashioned metric in today's world. Maybe their message is gaining traction. Which could be one answer to the question that forms the title of this article.

"As for rooting, can't say specifically for PayPal but many banking apps will specifically check for this and won't allow the app to be used." When it comes to security, bank - not fintech - seems to be the gold standard LOL!

Before the cybersecuristas run wild with doomsday scenarios, there are 697M debit cards in India, so the 3.2M debit cards affected by this breach works out to 0.46%. Hardly a massive breach...

"The study upends some previously held assumptions about Millennials, including its finding that, despite their digital connectivity, Millennials are extremely guarded about sharing their personal information." Yet another reason why Millennials Might Bankrupt Neobanks.

Will Millennials Bankrupt Neobanks?