Community

I got into a Q&A on some blog a few years ago with a Klarna cofounder / CEO. I remember him saying that Klarna charges merchants only 0.5% transaction fees, which is much lower than credit / debit card MSC and also that Klarna has been profitable from Day One!

I wouldn't set the bar that high - 10X better - for a new payment method to gain mainstream adoption. However, a new payment method can't afford to ignore certain obvious benefits of an incumbent payment method either. Credit card payments offer rewards, deferred payment and enhanced fraud protection. I doubt if A2A payment methods will offer these benefits. Therein lies the challenge to their mainstream adoption - apart from the other points mentioned in this post.

This is a classical case of the pendulum swinging to the other extreme after a crisis. There's no way a for-profit company can go without sales targets for too long. I predict that targets will be reinstated in a disguised form in a quarter or two. I don't know a single CEO who will be agreeable to answer to the Board and Wall Street without asking questions about the performance of the sales team!

I've interacted with bots that exhibited greater intelligence than some human operators. And this was in 2010 when I wrote a couple of blog posts describing my experience with both types of agents used by banks, councils and airlines: How Humanlike Are Virtual Agents? (hyperlink removed to comply with Finextra Community Rules but this post will appear on top of Google Search results when searched by the title). In the subsequent six years, I'm sure bots have become even more intelligent.

Whatever B2C fintechs have done so far is largely driven by VC funding. Very few of them would survive on their own P&L/BS. Traditionally VCs are wary of funding B2B ventures. That, more than anything else, will hold back fintechs in B2B - notwithstanding the much bigger B2B finserv market.

My bank will stop sending me statements after I cancel my credit card. How the heck do I "comb through months of statements to check for fraudulent transactions" that happen several months thereafter?

This is atrocious. I've heard about incidents of "temporary transfers" of funds from authorised to unauthorised accounts with a few other banks as well. I hope I'm wrong but this may just be the tip of the iceberg in the banking industry. On a side note, I totally agree with @PeterRobinson - US$ 185M fine is a rounding error in the P&L of a bank of WF's size.

I tend to agree with Panos Archondakis. Not that I have any personal experience with wealth management - sigh:( - but I still remember an article on Sunday Times London from 2007-8 in which a British celebrity (forget his name) had said that even with a bank balance of GBP 26M, he got very little service, let alone any personalized service, from his bank.

@JacobChristiansen: I too wonder about the same thing! Problem is that getting the basics right won't give any talking points to their C-Suite in their cocktail circuit! 

@MichaelKyritsis: Good catch LOL:) Now that you've mentioned it, the guy in the picture is likely not making a mobile payment at all. Most probably, he's awaiting the SMS OTP on his mobile phone, which he needs to complete a normal plastic payment on a desktop website! We go through this in India regularly! Mobile OTP: Cyanide Or Caffeine For Online Payments?