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@JohnQ:

TY for your comment. In the interest of brevity, in my post I'd deliberately skirted the inevitable insinuation that cash leads to tax evasion. But, now that you've raised it: 

• Cash and tax precede card and electronic payments by several centuries. So, cash does not automatically imply tax evasion.
• Proceeds of big time crime - e.g. insider trading - typically flow via wire transfers to offshore banking venues. Needless to say, no taxes are paid on them. So, electronic payment does not automatically imply tax compliance.
• There are zillions of businesses where the sale is recorded - and tax paid - although the payment is received largely in cash e.g. QSRs. Likewise the same cab industry where drivers shirk cards: The ride can be booked by mobile app, the passenger gets a print or electronic receipt at the end of the trip. And, to answer your question, yes, I can absolutely prove that I took any of these rides because I have the receipts. And since I submit these receipts along with my tax returns in order to claim deductions for these expenses, the tax department can also prove that these rides were taken and that the monies changed hands. 

Tax compliance or evasion depends more on whether the transaction was recorded or unrecorded, rather than the mode of payment.

If all these things happen, and inside the Google walled garden, I agree that Google gets to play Big Brother and can use all the person-specific insight to display ads on its SERPs. But a mere 1% average CTR for Google Ads suggests that all the Big Brother stuff doesn't touch 99% of the online population. That doesn't sound like omnipresent to me! I'm not sure if Amazon's reach is even as wide.

With 65% market share in USA, 35% of online users don't even use Google Search to do their searches. Of the 65%, many people head straight over to purpose-built platforms without using Google e.g. etrade for stocks, Expedia for flights and hotels, TicketMaster for live shows. Of the people who do use Google Search, Google itself has clarified that, unless a user is logged on to Google - and most users are not - Google does not associate search keywords or results with individual users. In over 10 years of using Amazon, I haven't searched even once for homes, cars and stocks on Amazon. Which is but natural since, when I last checked, which was 2 days ago, Amazon didn't sell homes, cars or stocks. So, can someone pray tell me how Google and Amazon know when I research homes, cars and stocks? As for "No legacy: It enables these companies to put systems in accordance to customer’s requirements", ha ha. When was the last time Google or Facebook changed their platforms in accordance with a single customer's requirements or even took a call from a single customer? Forget omnichannel or omnipresent - omnipotence is the word here and I'm sorry if I can't get myself to bestow that capability on Amazon, Google et al. 

Nothing in "bold at the end"! 

20/20 as it is, why does it take hindsight to realize "Payments ... is very hard to break through because not only do you have to get consumers, you also need merchants and often times… third parties like associations behind you to be successful...". IMHO, anyone with merely 3 months of exposure to the retail payments business would have enough foresight to know all this.

@DeanW: My guess of GBP 1T transaction value was only for retail banking. Since I make heavy use of Internet + Mobile Banking, I don't want banks to pull out of the digital race. On the contrary, I want them to enhance these two online channels. But, with a lukewarm yoy growth rate of 8.62% [(6.3-5.8)/5.8*100%] - yes, you're right, it's just over 8%, sorry my previous figure of 10.35% was wrong - I won't blame them for not doing so. We saw an attempt to ban cheques on the basis of irrational exuberance not supported by numbers. This was followed by not only reinstating cheques but making it easier for customers to process cheques via Mobile RDC. The same way, banks who're shutting down branches will get disappointed when they find low offtake for their purely digital channels. At that point, they'll start using digital aids to get more bang for their branch bucks. I see Tablet Banking by ICICI Bank and Van Banking by RBS - where bankers equipped with technology visit customers to provide face-to-face service - as two good examples of such an omnichannel strategy.

@UriR: Reports of Twitter activity level during Super Bowl and other sporting events are du jour but a study linking NetBanking & ePayment volumes to a World Cup Soccer match is truly a first for me. Kudos for this novel article. BTW, can you please enlarge your chart and repost it - maybe it's my advancing years but I can't read any of the legends!

Affirm sounds similar to BillMeLater, a startup founded in c.2005 and subsequently acquired by PayPal's owner eBay a few years later for ~US$ 1B.

Internet Banking has been around for over 10 years and Mobile Banking, for over 3 years. So the two technologies have collectively around for 6.5 years on an average. Rise in volume from 5.8B to 6.3B works out to 10.35% yoy growth. With total banking transaction volume likely to exceed 1T GBP, Internet + Mobile @ 6.3B GBP collectively account for < 1% of the total. Any consumer Internet technology that has these kind of numbers in its 7th year would be written off as massive failures. While I'm personally a fan of both technologies and have been using them since inception, numbers simply don't justify the exuberance.

I read somewhere that, while 70% of FORTUNE 500 companies have ERPs, over 90% of them submit their reports to their Boards in Excel. Spreadsheets are here to stay - I can bet that the investors are themselves very likely to use spreadsheets to evaluate the investee's proposal and to maintain the due diligence checklist. Tech vendors are increasingly realizing the futility of fighting Excel and positioning themselves as complementary to Excel - DOMO is an example I came across recently (https://twitter.com/GTM360/status/481444394747568128).