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Nice to see the headline corrected. I was wondering how an investment in "millions of dollars" could yield 2 billion dollars worth of stake! Even by Ponzi Crypto standard, that's a bit too mucht!!

Grewal v. Grewal. Not since Kramer versus Kramer have I come across the plaintiff and defendant with the same name. Since the movie about divorce case, same surname was a given.

Given the identical last names, Finextra might want to use full names while attributing quotes to the two Grewals. The last one, attributed to Grewel (sic), will particularly benefit from the full name.  

While selling COTS software to various industries, I've observed that the banking industry typically demands more extensions, customizations and interfaces (ECI) than most other industries.

In both onprem and SAAS models, product owner advocates against ECI.

That doesn't matter much in onprem model, where there are any number of third party service providers (including some of my ex-employers) who gladly do the ECI work e.g. Accenture, TCS, Wipro, et al. 

But in SAAS model, especially multitenanted SAAS, the product owner has much tighter control over the codebase and third party service providers reportedly can't do much ECI. 

Now, onprem or SAAS, banks are banks and cannot live without ECI, so it makes sense that they'd resort to BUILD rather than BUY in the SAAS world of today.

That said, even in the onprem world, while small and medium banks adopted BUY, large banks have typically resorted to BUILD in Trade Finance, Cash Management, Treasury Management and other areas of Commercial Banking. As testimony, many large banks still run very old homegrown COBOL legacy systems even today. Also, there are large banks who bought COTS software in their emerging market subsidiaries but built custom solutions for their HQ and subsidiaries in developed markets. 

I'm guessing Apple Pay will countersue Google Pay, Samsung Pay, et al for taking a mirror and offering essentially identical functionality as Apple Pay on Android devices:)

"AWS has changed prices 60 times since its launch in 2006. It introduced 20 new top-level services last year alone." ~ McKinsey.

Anecdotally, we keep hearing about sudden spikes in AWS bills from one month to another. 

I reckon fintechs can find a lot of cost savings in their AWS utilization rates hidden in plain sight.

LOL at the height of alternative payments boom some 8-10 years ago, I remember an article on these pages examining the optimum number of method of payments on ecommerce checkout pages.

If I search hard enough, I might be able to find my comment but, memory serves, I'd said that etailers and their consumers are used to navigating way more number of SKUs before reaching checkout page and won't be deterred by muliple MOPs on the checkout page. Accordingly, I predicted that merchants would keep addding MOPs instead of trying to optimize their count. 

Subsequent studies have shown that merchants believe that every additional MOP provides some sales lift.

In India, some streetside vendors have more MOPs than SKUs! 

"Traditional brick and mortar banks are slowly but surely becoming a thing of the past." 

LOL this sounds like a time warp after traditional banks celebrated one of their most profitable years of existence last year. 

I've been using Internet Banking for 20+ years. Still many of my banks are adding branches. 

So much for the prediction of death of traditional banks with branches.

Let me not even bring up the subject of the number of digital only / neobanks who have shuttered down during this period.

I'm amazed that it takes a countrywide outage for the national payments system of Canada to add a backup WAN link provider.  

Nice post but I totally disagree with the suggestion that credit card chargeback should be scrapped.

Instead, the industry has responded by introducing A2A RTP as a competing method of payment which does not have chargeback provision, lower MDR, so it's pro merchant as against credit card which is pro consumer. India's A2A RTP is very popular. USA's A2A RTP Zelle is gaining traction.   

Banks have always frontended KYC, thereby adding friction to their onboarding, and increasing abandonment rates whereas, at least since the times of PayPal, fintechs have backended KYC, thereby improving UX of onboarding, and increasing conversion rates.

However, when the rubber hits the road, fintechs expose the hidden steps, friction increases, and it all evens out at the end. 

We've seen that long ago with PayPal's light KYC of merchants at onboarding followed by full fledged KYC when money enters the merchant's account and merchant wants to transfer it to this bank account.

In the latest fracas over nonbank BNPL cards in India, we're seeing that with Partial KYC carried out by fintechs, which has come to surface because the regulator rained on fintechs' operating model parade by reiterating its rules on prepaid accounts, and now fintechs are admitting that they have been doing only partial KYC all along and are now offering to do Full KYC in return for regulator rolling back its recent PPI mandate.