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Maybe it's only me but shouldn't regulatory arbitrage be accepted - if not welcomed - as a natural consequence of Brexit? After all, elimination of regulatory arbitrage is one of the founding goals of any economic union.

No. Will you share your financial data with your energy utility to help you with your financial management? My bank is not qualified in energy management. Nor would I like it to stray away from its core competence to get into such an area. For help with energy management, I'd anyday go to my energy utility or a third party energy management company - there were 201 of them when I last checked.

"Over time, a company surely will accumulate data that seems irrelevant, but you shouldn’t be so quick to dispose of this data,". From a recent experience of one of my customers, I totally agree. One of their junior staffers was asked to remove duplicate records on their production database. He did a great job of this. Unfortunately, this corrupted the site search engine's indexes with the unintended consequence that the server went down. It took 36 hours of non-stop work to restore the website!

Are you saying an existing Top 4 bank can become the go-to bank for 90% of dissatisfied corporate clients or positing that a new bank can do this?

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.