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Brilliant one from Ron Shevlin about fintech:

https://twitter.com/GTM360/status/611480316436447232

@rshevlin: 

Don't be a fool

Fintech won't rule

No doubt they're real cool

But they're just a bank's tool

In an industry that's founded on the principle of charging for mitigation of pooled - rather than individual - risks, is a personalized insurance product very viable, profitable and compliant?

Talking of how difficult it can be to strike partnerships with MNOs, this just in:

http://www.medianama.com/2015/06/223-google-play-vouchers/

With its decision to go offline, Google seems to be signaling that even it's having a problem dealing with MNOs and taming their greed. In this day and age when people are crying hoarse at banks for charging 1-2% interchange fees for card payments, MNOs are apparently still demanding 30% transaction fees for carrier billing.

Hi @NigelW:

In your post you mentioned that others offer an alternative - i.e. raise LOC on an existing credit card - "in the time" it takes for your existing bank. Which matched my experience with all my banks. Had you mentioned that you found another bank that raised LOC instantly, I would've seen your point. I know I can get a new credit card instantly from another bank but that's beside the point because, for more reasons than one, that's very different from the present context of raising LOC on an existing credit card. 

MNOs lost it because "it can be quite frustrating to strike partnerships with MNOs." as I'd highlighted from my personal experience in my post. Africa is too broad a territory to credit MVNOs with success for. Apart from Kenya and one or two other countries, they've fumbled in most parts of the continent including South Africa. Personally, I'll believe that fintech has succeeded only when it hops off the VC gravy train, is forced to make revenues and profits and still manages to provide better CX than banks. IMO, that day is a long way off, especially when banking consumers - including me - are increasingly reporting that "financial institutions excel at leveraging digital technology to meet convenience and access needs of customers" (http://thefinancialbrand.com/52101/banking-consumer-service-expectation-study/).

Nice post. TELCOs completely lost it somewhere along the way: 

Banks Have Nothing To Fear From TELCOs

Customer calls Bank. Customer asks for a "new product". Bank responds immediately saying it will take them 10 days to get back with a decision. While we can debate about the 10 days duration, there can be no argument that every seller has the right to take its time to decide whether to sell a product to a given customer, especially when the "product" involves increasing the Bank's risk exposure to the customer. 

On the other hand, let's take a classical situation faced by banks and every user of IT: Tech vendor delivers a product / software. Product has a defect. Bank calls Vendor. Bank reports defect. After accepting the defect, Vendor responds saying, per SLA, resolution time is 30 days. Vendor can't decide whether to rectify the defect or not - it must, both contractually and morally - but it still wants 30 days.

Coming from the tech industry, I find it hard to claim that the bank is the one to have customer-insensitive culture or processes.

@IgorA + 1. Much as I'm a tech marketer and would want to claim that technology determines a bank's fate, technology is only an enabler. Claiming that banks are incapable of innovation because they use legacy systems is like claiming that Apple is incapable of innovation because iOS apps are written in the 1980s era Objective C programming language. With whatever technology it uses, banking is the most profitable industry in FORTUNE 500 (Source: FORTUNE article http://ow.ly/d/3jtk). 

Nice post but to imply that banks are incapable of innovation because they're held back by legacy systems is tantamount to saying that Apple is incapable of innovation because iOS apps are written in 1980s era Objective C programming language.

Although I'm not Apple's marketer, I'm a marketer and I don't see any reason why Apple shouldn't charge banks for Apple Pay. If the "marginal costs to run the service must be negligible" logic were applied to the software industry, products like Oracle RDBMS and SAP ERP - to name just two - should've been given away for free for at least the past 10 years. I do agree that issuer banks should be free to pass on the Apple Pay fee to payers. We'll then get a chance to see just how badly customers want to ditch plastic.