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YaaY I'm happy to hear this. If a govt can't take steps to stop people from needing loans, then it shouldn't take steps to stop people from taking loans. 

It's easy to talk about predatory interest etc., but it's daft to compare BNPL with loans available to 850 FICO score borrowers. Compared to loan sharks, BNPL rates are definitely lower. I always felt that protests against BNPL are lame.

If banks and fintechs don't give loan, they will be accused of elitism and thwarting financial inclusion. If they do give loan, they will be accused of irresponsible lending and preying on the vulnerable. End of the day, the decision to take a loan or not is down to the consumer. Govt. should ensure that borrowers are in a position to take responsibility for their actions instead of engaging in regulatory overreach on the supplier side. 

Regardless of the financial situation of the customer, higher interest rate on deposit will improve the customer's financial wellbeing.

OTOH, higher interest rate on deposit will degrade the bank's (or fintech's) financial wellbeing.

It's not only deposit interest rate.Take Right of Offset, which allows a bank to recover unpaid mortgage, auto loan, etc. from checking account / savings account / CD of the borrower if they're held at the same bank. Any bank that cares about customer's financial wellbeing will urge its customers to spread their banking products across different banks. But such an action would run counter to its self-interest to upsell and cross sell more products and increase "products per customer", which is a north star metric for banks.

Unlike any other industry that I can think of, banking (and fintech) industry has tons of conflicts of interest baked into its very charter.  

I totally agree with Matt Levine that "A bank with sleepy depositors would do well, a bank with antsy depositors would go bust, even if their investments were the same."

tl;dr: No, banks (or fintechs) cannot be guardians of customers' wellbeing.

For similar reasons, banks (and fintechs) can't be expected to spend too much time and effort on spreading financial literacy.

UPI does NOT obviate the need for NEFT or RTGS "banking procedures" (sic). That's because it's not possible to make an outward UPI payment from the current account of a private limited or public limited company, so these heavy users of cheque, RTGS and NEFT continue to use the same MOPs as before.  

A couple of years ago, I'd predicted in Decoding The Tenuous Link Between GDP And Payment Volumes* that supply chain payments in retail will transition to UPI. According to my recent dipstick survey of 10 stores in my neighborhood, that has not happened. While consumers pay retailers with UPI or Credit Card, most retailers continue to pay their wholesalers by cheque.

This resonates with my behavior as business owner: Although I sell digital payments for a living, when it comes to making payments from my company account, I strictly use cheques for any payments exceeding five figures (INR) or three figures (USD/EUR/GBP). It's because of risk of failed payments, abysmal redressal mechanism to retrieve failed payments and non-availability of receipt from payee in the case of NEFT / IMPS / RTGS payments.

Contrary to popular narrative, UPI has not reduced / killed Visa / MasterCard credit card: In the last three years, V / MC have doubled the count of their credit cards in India - from 40M in the first 40 year history of the industry to 80M in the next three years.

This is because India is an emerging market and cash is more than 75% of Indian economy. It's only if India becomes a mature market that one MOP will cannibalize other MOPs. Until then all MOPs will grow in tandem.

* Hyperlink to post on my company website removed to comply with Finextra Community Rules but this post should appear on top of Google Search results when searched by its title followed by GTM360.

Nice post!

I totally agree that it's uncommon for a single application to be served from multiple cloud platforms.

I maybe speculating way above my technical paygrade here but would splitting the web server, application server and data base server of the same application across three different cloud platforms be a low hanging fruit for this use case? 

We've been hearing all this for years with TransferWise, Ripple et al using tech-medidated hawala, opaque cryptocurrency, etc. but, a decade later, we are where we are.

Hope RTGS.global fares better in its pursuit than the others did in theirs.

Hahaha.

To anyone who has been following fintechs since their inception, this would go down as "WTF News of the Decade".

One of the clarion calls of fintech at its inception was "Kill Bank Fees". Fintechs planned to fulfill this promise by using latest technology, among other things that I highlighted in my post Calling BS Of Bank Fintech Partnership.  

It's surreal to now see the same fintechs complaining about bank fees!!!

LOL @DineshKatyal + 1.

Last I checked, Block / Square used to levy a flat fee of 2.75% to its merchants, of which 2% went to Visa / Mastercard as interchange fee. Reading between the lines of this complaint, I'm guessing V / MC have hiked their fee so Block's rake has fallen from 0.75%.

Oh, sure, the bank surely knows the verified name and address of the scammer but, for reasons I highlighted in Why Is It So Hard To Catch Cybercriminals?, there are many a slip between the cup and the lip. 

On a side note and ICYMI, here's a nice debate on whether Vector Database is just another feature on existing popular databases or it's worth a separate product. 

TY @Steve Wilcockson, I don't know enough about the internals of LLM to claim that I understand your explanation but if I think back to my engineering college project on Monte Carlo simulation, I recall that I needed to change the value of the seeds manually for every iteration whereas, if I understand you right, AI will do that automatically, thus arguably delivering faster / better / cheaper results than any human can.

If so, then AI is definitely takes modeling and simulation to the next level.