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TY @ShoumitBhattacharya for your comment. I've never been too comfortable with this advice by pundits to sales people to "always be helping" - as though customers are perpetually in need of help and / or are willing to accept help from anyone and everyone. I like your term "facilitating attitude" better. It implies expedition of what customers are already doing. Since virtually everyone I know would appreciate a bit of expedition from anyone, "facilitating" will always work. Bankers have to find ways to make their sales people develop a facilitating attitude, which is the harder part!

Okay, thanks. In all 4 cases, I guess beneficiary is paid in fiat currency, not BTC; in all probability, sender also funds the transaction in fiat currency, not BTC. This causes the classical last mile and first mile problem in the "rebittance" business. There's no guarantee that cross-border remittances done via BTC / BlockChain are faster than those done in fiat currencies. 

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/21/bitcoin-last-mile/

SnapChat and Starbucks have valuations / revenues in $$B. Compared to that, $175M in Powa is peanuts. SnapChat and Starbucks use QR code technology. Maybe I should claim that this proves that QR code is the greatest invention since sliced bread. But I won't. IMO, Powa's failure has little to do with technology and lot to do with weakness of its value proposition. When it comes to the $$$-$$$$ ticket size items featured by Powa, perhaps impulse purchase is not a thing.

Maybe this shows that there's a limit to impulse shopping - whether by QR code or any other technology. On another note, isn't Powa more martech than fintech?

Yet another wannabe disruptor gets disrupted. RIP.

Can you name any fintech product / service that will "start eating the banks lunch with their own mobile POS devices"? *ALL* mPOS vendors I know continue to need a bank as acquirer and pay full MSC / MDF to acquirer banks. Whatever they charge for their service, they recover by way of higher fees from merchants. More in my blog post Hiding Your Secret Sauce.

Can you explain how Apple Pay and Google Pay will "cause banks to lose out on the acquiring chain"? They might place themselves between the consumer and the acquirer bank but they don't disintermediate the acquirer bank. Even when a customer pays by plastic card, the merchant sits between consumer and acquirer bank. As a matter of fact, as I'd highlighted in my post Apple Puts Banks Squarely At The Center Of Mobile Payments, Apple Pay actually puts banks right in the middle of the payment chain instead of disintermediating them.

"Research by Javelin shows that the value of false declines per year has hit $118 billion, more than 13 times the total amount lost annually to actual card fraud ($9 billion)."

“While the industry has relentlessly worked to reduce fraud, some of these efforts have resulted in an increase in transactions being needlessly declined,”.

I suspected something like this when I wrote Mitigating Fraud Does Not Pay The Bills

But I didn't dream that the revenue loss would be 13X of fraud loss.

Keen to know the key difference between a traditional bank lending directly versus via an online P2P platform. As far as I know, online P2P platforms do not take loans materializing on their platforms on their books.

Great initiative! Kudos to ICICI Bank.

On another note, while INR has fallen sharply against USD lately, INR 20 lakhs is still worth a lot more than US$ 20K - it's close to US$ 30K, per current exchange rate (1 USD = 68.81 INR).

The cited BI article has a line saying Powa didn't take off because of lukewarm consumer adoption. BUY button on Google search results or Pinterest boards, Powa Tag on print ads - neither of them has set the world on fire. Wonder what was the real problem in the case of Powa - not enough ads carrying Powa tags or not enough people scanning QR codes on the ads or poor unit economics or something else.