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According to Michael Lewis' Flash Boys, Goldman Sachs regularly took over open source software, made changes to it but failed to submit it back to the open source community. Now, we hear this about RBS. Even counting only the software that they pay for, banking is one of the biggest consumers for IT. If we add the rest of the software they use, they might easily top the list. 

@PaulL: I don't know the exact figures but even V/MC debit interchange rate has been low in India - our regulator-cum-central bank RBI seems to have done a a Dodd-Frank-Durbin on the industry long ago! That said, RuPay's sponsor, NPCI, is a not-for-profit government corporation, so we can never underestimate its pricing power. Given that RuPay has placed overseas acceptance on its own roadmap, it'd appear that co-branding with V/MC is either not permitted or not desired or both, but I'm not sure.

@PaulL: TY for sharing this article. Since RuPay has been around for over two years in India, I never got the "launch" part of the news when I read it a few days ago. Not one of my banks has approached me to replace / supplement my existing V/MC debit-cum-ATM cards with a RuPay card. There's still no credit card on RuPay. V/MC don't need to maintain a security deposit to continue to operate in India. On the ground, the "taking on global players" part of the article sounds hollow and is a far cry from what's happening with V/MC in Russia. 

From what I understand of latest developments in India, nonbanks can become members of mobile payment network - and even offer CI-CO feature at their agents' stores - as long as they obtain an MTO license from RBI. As a merchant, should I be bothered that SQUARE needs merchant aggregation, whatever that might mean in this context?

While there were a few mPOSs before SQUARE and there are many of them after SQUARE, the Silicon Valley startup disrupted this space by letting businesses accept credit card payments without needing them to get a merchant account from a bank, which they most probably wouldn't have managed to get. Few SQUARE competitors do this but SQUARE does solve a huge problem for such merchants who might otherwise have lost the sale. More details can be found on my sidebar about SQUARE in my Aug. 2012 op-ed piece in the JIBC journal (http://www.arraydev.com/commerce/jibc/articles.htm).

I use Keyring App on Android to store all my loyalty cards and I know many people who do the same on iPhones using Passbook. I haven't come across a single merchant who has invested in installing equipment to scan the barcodes off of my smartphone screens. However, with an increasing number of them willing to read the loyalty card numbers off my smartphone screens and credit rewards for my purchases, Keyring is at last proving useful. While Vodafone is not a trailblazer, it's at least a fast follower in expanding mobile wallet to support a powerful use case.

Accelerating Mobile Wallet Adoption By Fixing What's Broken  

After being around for nearly two decades, ecommerce for physical goods accounts for only 6% of retail sales. If online sales of mortgages has already hit 16%, that's really BIG news. Any idea if the mortgage application is omnichannel or 100% online? From Multichannel To Omnichannel And Beyond

I suspect that this is yet another wannabe bank killer trying to stay afloat by pivoting itself into a banking agent. I remember that the charter of one of these self-proclaimed disruptors had originally forbidden banks from taking the other side of loans initiated on their P2P lending platforms. Reality strikes hard now.

It takes an oligarch to break an oligopoly! The ultimate irony would be if the security deposit is used as capital for creating the local alternative. Wonder if this strategy will be copied by other nations.

In what was arguably a global first, ICICI Bank did this over 2 years ago in India (https://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=23331). At the time, I'd commented that, since I found no compelling reason to switch away from NetBanking, I was unlikely to use the FB channel beyond my trial for novelty's sake. I predicted right. But that's only me. With more banks launching FB Banking, we'll soon know how many customers really wish to use social media for banking.