Community

What bet if anybody ranked banks on UX, the league table would be exactly upside down!

Just joking but seems like nobody has still managed to crack the Holy Grail of the tradeoff between security and convenience.

USP of eWallets like PayTM in India: Superior UX created by subvention of India's 2FA mandate. Per mandate, each online payment invoking credit card / debit card / bank account requires 2FA. However, you can transfer a lumpsum amount from any of those funding sources to ewallet with just a single 2FA and then make multiple payments from the ewallet without requiring 2FA for each individual payment.

Per Q&A6145 of EBA, this subvention is not allowed in EU PSD2 / SCA.

I've been buying products from the Amazon website / app for 25 years.

During this period, I've tried to buy the same products from the websites / apps of brick-and-mortar retailers and the original product companies. I don't recall the last time I succeeded.

Also, during the same period, I've successfully bought credit card on bank websites, insurance on insurance company websites, bought and sold stocks on eTrading websites, but failed to buy a bank account on a bank website. IME, the biggest bugbear for FI DX is suboptimal handling of channel hop-offs involved in omnichannel customer journeys, which is more a business problem than a technology problem.   

Going by my experience, financial institutions easily outperform all industries except ecommerce on digital transformation. While there's always scope for improvement, I don't agree that FIs "stumble on the path" of DX initiatives. 

TY Yuri Kropelnytsky.

Fintech:

I'm going by the definition given in Why Banks Will Never Catch Up With Fintechs (Disclosure: I'm the author!). It resonates strongly with the Wikipedia description of the term: 

"Fintech refers to firms using new technology to compete with traditional financial methods in the delivery of financial services."

Spend Management Software:

This description by Gartner does not say financial technology software. There's a list of leading vendors on that page. I've not heard anyone call them fintechs.

-----

As I said, this is the classical definition at inception. Over time, the bank-disruption posturing of fintechs flopped. The industry started chanting the bank-partnership mantra.

As a result, the scope of fintech - and, along with that, of financial technology software category - gradually expanded over time. Which is fine by me, as long as we know which version of "fintech" and "financial technology software" we're talking about - because there are huge differences in business model, TAM, and valuations depending on the specific definition used. 

Not to muddy the waters but there's also BaaS, Embedded Finance, etc. now!

Per classical definition, FINTECH is an industry type and primarily refers to companies that compete with traditional banks by offering bank accounts, debit cards, credit cards and other financial services products. 

Going by that, I don't get the term "fintech software" used in this post. 

Is it the same as core banking software, credit card management system, ATM switch, Online Banking, Mobile Banking and other financial technology software supplied by IBMs, Infosyses, Oracles, and other IT companies?

If not, can you please give a few examples of what you call "fintech software" with specific reference to the industry verticals that use them? 

Invoicing, procurement and other software used by corporates surely have an element of money but they're not considered as financial technology software. By the same token, AFAIK, Spend Management is also not a financial technology software.

Retailers keep whining about 2-3% MSC / MDR incurred by them for accepting credit card payments. On top of that, there's a ton of rules to comply with.

We keep hearing about A2A RTP and Open Banking Payments. 

Why don't retailers embrace them and ditch credit card networks altogether?

Feh on such an egregious instance of price control! Late Fees is between Credit Card Issuer and Credit Cardholder. Third parties have no business interfering, that too in a case when the charge is triggered by sheer negligence on the part of one party and not by any duress caused by the other.  

I've heard of so many proposals from CFPB accompanied by lofty sermons by Rohit Chopra. Does anyone know how many of them have actually become rules?

When Plaid et al have already used free market ethos to generate 80M users for "Open Banking" apps in USA without any regulation, I really don't see what CFPB's proposal on Dodd-Frank s1033 is going to achieve.

I proposed Open Banking Coin as monetary compensation for bank customers to share their transaction data with third parties in my 2018 post entitled Open Banking Needs A Blockchain Boost.

Nice to see Urbanx Point come close to my vision of OBCoin!

Ten years? OMG.

I know the Netflix TV Series THE KONG OF STONKS is "not about Wirecard" but I never got the impression while watching it that the German payments tech company featured in the show was able to carry out its shenanigans for as long as 10 years!

Not to mention the setting of remote working. Despite telling employees to come to office for over a year, WFH is apparently still a thing in Goldman Sachs, etc.