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@TayloeDraughon:

Totally agree that compliance officer shouldn't be made to face personal liability alone. Brilliant suggestion about the need for legal counsel.

In the early 2000s, I set up my company's subsidiary in Germany. Although I was not a compliance officer, I carried all the compliance risks in my capacity as the MD of the German subsidiary. My company approved my request to be provided with two insurance policies that protected me from personal liability in the event the company ran afoul of local laws. Translating from German, they were called Third Party Liability Insurance and Legal Defence Insurance. Not sure if such insurance products are available in Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions (e.g. USA / UK) but D&O insurance should come close.

MasterCard's inControl, launched 6-7 years ago, can do virtually everything this Visa API can. In fact, inControl was the subject of my first ever Finextra blog post back in 2010!

Credit Cards Come A Full Circle

Hope Capitalise has better luck than MoneyAisle and TransFS, both of whom started with a similar offering but folded up / pivoted away.

@JoãoBohner: You can force the physical movement of currency notes to happen via RFID gantries, thereby ensuring that the RFID chip in them is read and recorded. What's the compelling reason for an NFC-wielding recipient to scan the currency notes they receive? In any case, the point is moot because I strongly doubt if there's any ROI for any FI to implement either RFID / NFC systems. On the contrary, they make money when currency notes are banned and the transaction is forced to happen via card / equivalent method of payment that gives them interchange / equivalent fees.

@JoãoBohner: I think it was tried and given up because not everywhere the notes go can be expected to have an RFID gantry, without which the RFID chip can't be read.

Cash is still the ONLY retail payments method that's realtime and not dependent on third parties (Source: DB Research). This is a very significant benefit for payors and payees who are the two most important stakeholders of a payment transaction. Most articles and alternative payments advocating cashless payments conveniently ignore this point. Not surprisingly, 85% of all payments in the world still happen in cash (Source: PayPal CEO Dan Schulman on the ‘Venmo line’ and the fact that cash will never die).

@HamzaAbu-Musa: You can find more details of timeframes etc. at http://qwt.io/s_ketharaman/Ivfg

@JeremyMugridge: Looks like the situation is the same in India and UK! I agree that investment banks owned by traditional banks have to contend with legacy backoffice issues. That said, nonbank owned investment platforms also have their own problems - e.g. seamy interface with funding sources - that are arguably tougher to solve since they're outside their control.

Agreed. This is not the situation only in UK. 

USA

In the same period that the TOP 10 INTERNET-ONLY BANKS GREW DEPOSITS BY $175 BILLION, THE THREE MAJOR LEGACY RETAIL POWERHOUSES – CHASE, WELLS AND BANK OF AMERICA – GREW DEPOSITS BY $1.27 TRILLION. More at http://qwt.io/s_ketharaman/Ivfg

INDIA

The central bank recently granted "Payment Bank" licenses to 10+ companies, one of which is PAYTM, originally a nonbank mobile wallet. The company has rightly figured out that its target audience of unbanked is likely to want to experience financial services for the first time in a F2F environment and has announced plans to set up branches. To build scale, it has also announced bancassurance partnerships with leading traditional banks to distribute insurance products at its branches.

(contd...) 

Unfortunately, fintech (i.e. nonbank) investment platforms suffer from a lot of friction, as I'd highlighted in Banks Have Nothing To Fear From Neobanks. As a result, I wonder if bank-owned investment platforms have too much incentive to find ways of enhancing CX.