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SQUARE essentially delivers risk-free interchange revenues to banks and doesn't disintermediate them, as is commonly hyped. I was assuming that, in the process of doing so, it was earning enough money for itself. I now realize how mistaken my assumption is. On another note, banks have been making money hand over fist for 40-50 years in this business. It's amazing how wannnable disrupters enter it and bleed so badly. But, credit where credit's due, they've mastered the art of getting acquired for billions without much to show by way of revenues or profits. 

@FinextraM: Even Michael Lewis admits that all methods used are legal, unlike steroids. No one is slowing anyone down - they're just running faster. This is not the only issue that illustrates how vested interests hold sway over fairness, at least in Wall Street.

@Mr.Barnes: My comments are restricted to the book but, nevertheless, TY for referring me to the interview. Supply of direct feeds is not restricted to any specific trading firm - just that, until IEX / Brad K pointed it out to them, the average investor didn’t know about such feeds or their use in this (legal) manner by HFT traders.

IMO, there is a real potential for rigging when it's legal for banks to trade on their own accounts under the (naive) stipulation that their prop shops shouldn’t access info regarding their clients' orders. Volcker Rule will change all that but that’s a story for another day. 

@Mr.Barnes: The way I understand it, there's no "provision of information ahead of other traders". Every trader gets the price info at BAT - situated closest to downtown Manhattan - at the same time. A subset of traders are able to use the same info earlier than the others ("competitive advantage") at the exchanges located farther away because they have invested in Spread Networks' line ("superior technology"). If that's rigging, so would be many other situations e.g. the winning relay team that used (say) superior shoes to reach the baton to the finishing line earlier than the other teams. 

Here's a nice article in IT WORLD that explains why mainframe sales keep growing.

http://www.itworld.com/hardware/413705/how-mainframe-lasted-50-years-adaptation

Michael Lewis calls the use of technology to acquire a competitive advantage - admittedly an unfair one - rigging. I didn't accept this contention when I read the reviews. I still don't accept it after reading the book.

Once I got over the disorientation of seeing a post like this on Finextra - rather than LinkedIn Technology Sales Group or somewhere else like that - I found it interesting. I strongly suspect that sales incentive policies inherited from the onpremise days are responsible for sales people being more excited about new customer acquisition. After all, with renewal revenue restricted to AMC @ 18-20% of the license fee collected upfront in Year 1, onpremise companies didn't want their A sales teams to chase renewals. In fact, I know many companies where the field sales organization is not even allowed to handle existing accounts.

With SaaS, things are totally different: There's no pot of gold at the end of the sales cycle rainbow. Renewals are worth everything. The vendor is perpetually in the sales mode. In my experience, most SaaS vendors are near-startups and don’t have a mature incentive policy. But, when they get there, they need to make sure that renewals are compensated as lucratively as signups. That’s a critical success factor for SaaS vendors.

Wonder if Twitter will renew its firehose contracts with DataSift, Radian6, ViralHeat and other competitors of Gnip. 

@PaulL: Legacy has been around for around five decades if not longer. People have been trying - without much success - to get rid of it for at least a decade. I may be naive but I tend to think that there can't be anything wrong with something that has this kind of pedigree. Of course, there could be a lot of things suboptimal with legacy code in the context of mobile, omnichannel and things like that. But, I remember the same was said when phonebanking and netbanking entered the picture a decade or two ago. Those straws didn't break the legacy camel's back. Neither will these. Since one of the most powerful use cases of SOA is to hide the deficiencies of the underlying legacy application, why not consciously push the complexity to the SOA layer instead of tinkering with the legacy code? End of the day, I trust my bank with my money and I'm perfectly okay if it follows the old adage "don't fix it if it ain't broken".

I definitely see omnichannel banking as the way forward:

From Multichannel To Omnichannel And Beyond

However, it's not easy to get omnichannel banking right and fiascos abound:

Omnichannel Fiasco 1: Standard Chartered Credit Card

If it's any consolation for banks, nonbanks do an even worse job of omnichannel:

Omnichannel Fiasco No. 2: M-PESA

The ex US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once asked, "What number do I dial if I want to talk to Europe?". SMEs face a similar situation: Collectively, they might constitute a big market, but, end of the day, what counts is business volumes with individual companies and, unfortunately, very few SMEs have too much clout individually to influence the value proposition of big banks.