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tl;dr: Bank customers use branch to explore the purchase of new financial products and digital banking to use financial products that they have already purchased. This perfectly captures my consumer behavior. Seems like my nearly 10 year old blog post titled Secret Of Survival Of Bank Branches has aged well. 

All the benefits of remittance banks have been true for decades. But, still mainstream banks have not gone big on the remittance business. It's because banks view remitters as impoverished, nearly illiterate, and hence not worthy of selling checking accounts, credit cards, mortgages and other banking products. They don’t want these guys coming into their branches and cluttering up their nice clean offices. Apparently, banks fear that putting remittance service stickers on their windows would dilute their brands. This may be politically incorrect but it is factually correct. 

@BillTrueman: (1) Feel free to show your jingoism by dragging India into the picture unnecessarily but that won't stop you from displaying your ignorance about what's happening in UK: British courts have ruled that APP scams are caused by gross negligence of payors and tossed out demands for reimbursement by banks. (2) It's a fraud commited by payee on payor, not by bank, payor can seek redress from law enforcement but it's not banks' job to reimburse. At least that's how civilized societies work - when B defrauds A, they tell cops to nail B, they don't tell C to compensate A. (3) If payee bank has broken the law in opening account for scammer payee, there are provisions in the law to penalize the said bank, they should be invoked without waiting for a scam to happen.

£0 is the correct amount. With some more lobbying by banks, I'm sure it will come down to that figure. APP Scam is caused by gross negligence of payor. Let them be held liable for the full amount, including, but not limited, to £415,000 or £85,000. OTOH, if unscrupulous payor-payee scammers engage in first party fraud, as it happens frequently in credit card payments, scammed banks should be reimbursed the full amount, without any cap at £415,000.

Meanwhile, until the reimbursable limit touches £0, banks will hold up payments under the pretense of having to do more scrutiny to prevent APP Scam, earn more float, and totally defeat the purpose of Faster Payments.  

I agree with the problems with BaaS and myself highlighted the one key issue related to safety of money in my blog post Bank v. Neobank: Safety Of Money In The Light Of Synapse - Evolve Fracas. Consumer behavior has repeatedly shown that, whenever customers are anxious, they veer towards the more traditional approach i.e. from unregulated non-licensed neobanks to regulated licensed banks. In the most recent manifestation of this behavior when SVB and a couple of other banks failed last spring, there was a flight of capital to the JPMCs and BofAs and Wells Fargos of the world despite the fact that at least one of those traditional banks had been caught commiting fraud and fined heavily not very long ago. Against that backdrop and especially in uncertain times, I'm not able to see how customers will go in the opposite direction towards unregulated non-licensed blockchain neobanks who introduce an additional risk of holding deposits in a nonfiat currency. While Tether and other stablecoins posture stability by having a fixed parity with fiat currencies - mostly USD - anybody who does even an hour of due diligence on them will come across a lot of FUD about whether they're really backed by government bonds and other gilt-edge securities as they claim to be. 

The A2A RTP / Faster Payments rail is called FPS in UK, FedNow in USA, IMPS / UPI in India. Any idea what's the name for the one in Switzerland?

Here's my pointwise reply:

"This creates a unique challenge: the data becomes inseparable from the "software" (i.e., the model).". Bingo! "Inseparability" is EXACTLY how vendors will pitch the need to own all data (and features)!

"If a vendor were to use this specialized model for another client, they would inadvertently be transferring knowledge derived from one customer's proprietary data to another. This scenario is fundamentally different from traditional software...". I'm NOT so sure of that. From time to time, SAAS vendors have been nailed for transferring knowledge derived from one customer's proprietary data to another e.g. Carta, Oracle, Salesforce.

As in the past, vendors will make a lot of song and dance during presales about "balancing ownership rights with the need to protect customer-specific knowledge" but the proverbial footnote #3 in page #42 of their contract will likely vitiate that when the rubber hits the road.

Unfo, warnings like that rarely work. Because many money making schemes that sound too good to be true have been true - such as the following ones explained in the post titled "Seven Money-Making Schemes That Sound Too Good To Be True – But Are True" on my company website*. 

1. Sam Bankman-Fried Khimchi Premium
2. Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal Flipkart Sale
3. Bernie Madoff Ponzi Scheme
4. Kunal Shah Startups
5. eBay Bonanza

(hyperlink to the blog post removed removed to comply with Finextra Community Rules but this post should appear on top of Google Search results when searched by its title + "GTM360") 

COTS and SAAS come with very little data out-of-the-box. Almost all the data that's inside them in a live installation is entered by customer (or their implementation partner) during the implementation. While they come with a lot of features out-of-the-box, most midsized to large enterprise implementations involve extensions / customizations specific to the customer. STILL, all large COTS and SAAS vendors have somehow managed to retain ownership of the entire software, including customer-specific data and extension / customizations. While the vendor cannot make one customer's data available to another customer, it can - and often does - merge most extensions / custoizations into the future version of its product and thereby makes them available to other customers. This is despite almost all customers asking for joint ownership. Since I've been in enterprise software sales for decades, I know exactly how vendors manage to wrangle unilateral ownership but that's not the key point in the current context. 

In the case of GenAI, the out-of-the-box software contains a lot of data on which the models are trained by the vendor - data that's not supplied by the customer. IMO it'll be way easier for GenAI vendors to wrangle total ownership of data. 

In other words, I'm predicting the exact opposite of your prediction. Once again, vendors won't be able to make one customer's data available to other customers.

Many of these use cases are quite old but what's new is that they can potentially be made faster / better / cheaper by infusing AI into them. Here's a topical example: 

My CA Firm sent me a challan for paying Professional Tax for two Financial Years. I found this strange because I normally pay PT every FY. The partner insisted that I hadn't paid PT last year. I wasn't so sure and wanted to check. I went to my company's NetBanking, downloaded the Statement of Accounts for many FYs, manually combed through every line item to figure out whether I'd already paid PT for that FY or not. This took a while. 

When Alexa came out, many people, including me, predicted that Alexa Banking would solve this problem by using its Voice UI to instantly answer the question "Did I make a Professional Tax payment in FY2023?". It did not. 

Let's hope that AI will.