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You won't get "fries with that", though! Talking of which, I thought the smallest McCafe cost more than $2, thereby calling for a $200 outlay on the AmEx card?

Investment banks use algo trading to automatically crunch prices, analyze economic indicators, decide what to buy, figure out where and at what price to buy it and stream the order along to the selected exchange - all in milliseconds.  In doing so, they’ve found even the speed of light to be constraining and innovated by laying new cables between the various trading venues. Going by Michael Lewis’ latest bestseller "Flash Boys", algo trading has spread so widely in the last 5-6 years that it has overturned the league tables of top traders. To me, all this sounds as though (investment) banks have left everyone else far behind in the Big Data race. 

With US banking industry profitability near record levels (WSJ, http://online.wsj.com/articles/u-s-banking-industry-profits-racing-to-near-record-levels-1407773976), banks probably know something that others don't about how to eat what appears to others as heavy fixed costs but still go laughing all the way to the - ahem! - bank?

20 years is not bad - just twice as long as it takes to "become an overnight celebrity in Hollywood!"

WordStar in 1994? I remember moving from WS to WordPerfect for a few months in 1992 and switching to Word permanently sometime in 1993. Two decades later, it's still Word for me.

PS: Congrats on the long stint and best wishes for many more years in fintech. 

One of my banks - a Top 5 private sector bank - launched PFM around 4 years ago and made it available free-to-cost to all customers. But, it pulled the plug on this app around 2 years ago. 

Banks can always relaunch PFM now but let's see how feasible that is. A "...single view of various accounts ... with various institutions" is a basic PFM functionality. Delivering it would require a customer to share the NetBanking credentials of all their financial institutions with the PFM-offering bank. This would break all rules imposed by banks forbidding their customers from sharing their PIN, password and other credentials with anyone, "not even with our own employee, however official looking" to quote a standard warning on the website of one of my banks. More in my personal blog post "How Many More PFMs Do We Need?" (hyperlink removed but this post will show up in the Top 3 Google results).

Against this backdrop, I'm keen on knowing how banks in India can offer PFMs.

@KrisK: Good to meet you on @FinextraBlogs! It's indeed a testament to the versatility in its design that enables FPS be used in so many different contexts in so many different geographies. Are you aware of any Venmo-like P2P service outside the US over Faster Payments or otherwise?

Some 10 years after mobile wallets started threatening to displace plastic, at last "The pound in our pocket is increasingly being displaced by the plastic in our wallet".

There we go:

Icahn bullish on Apple Pay prospects

Apple Pay is likely to prove a money spinner, generating revenues of $2.5 billion in 2017 in the US alone, predicts activist investor Carl Icahn. https://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=26564

MS Windows and Office have been around for over 20 years. Microsoft must've recovered the bulk of their development costs long ago. I'm also sure technology has removed the friction in software development and offshoring has brought down the costs. I hope the Microsoft C Suite follows the "low cost should mean low price" theory of their founder so that I can very soon get my Windows and Office copies for a pittance, if not free-of-cost.

Although I never paid 7.9% on my cross-border remittances via conventional banks, in hindsight I wouldn't have minded the high fees. At least the money reached the destination as advertised on all occasions. Which is something I can't say for the transactions made via PayPal and any of the neobank alternatives. As for mobile channels, suffice to say that, six months later, I still can't access my money in M-PESA. (https://www.finextra.com/blogs/Fullblog.aspx?blogid=9273). 

My figure is of addressable market, which is always computed without reference to any particular player's market share because there's nothing in theory preventing any player from gunning for the whole market. In actual practice, however, Apple may end up with anything - including nothing - if the cynical prediction about card network behavior I'd made in my earlier comment comes true.

Outside the circle of finsurgents and digerati, I don't see anything cool about paying with Apple instead of plastic card. But what do I know? I'm not even a Fanboy!