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*Oops, LIFO not FIFO.

Klarna. Sweden. Continental Europe. Not the first or the last Fintech that leverages Regulatory Gap.

Fintechs Need Marketers And Lobbyists, Not Lawyers 

By laying off employees with over 5 years experience, Klarna has also allegedly violated the Swedish FIFO firing law.

Blitzscaling gurus tell startups to be tone-deaf to customer complaints. I'm guessing Klarna has extended the blitzscaling best practice to employees. Well played.

"Businesses ... will need to have the technical capability and resources within their business to implement the API".

Banks took the same stance on Merchant Account. By making it possible for businesses without said qualifications to accept credit card payments, PayPal, Stripe and Square became amongst the most successful fintechs of all time. 

Now, with the same stance, banks are opening up the CoP field to fintechs who will make it easy for businesses to implement Confirmation of Payee functionality without the qualifications demanded by banks.

I wonder why banks take this stance repeatedly. Is it because (A) They do not realize the consequences of their stance (B) They do not have the tech chops to be able to develop a solution in a way that will remove the need for businesses to have tech chops, or (C) They do it consciously to create space for fintechs in which they can invest via their venture capital subsidiaries, as they have done in Stripe, Plaid, etc.

Parler promised total Freedom of Expression to users of its social media app but itself got banned on AppStore and Play Store because its unmoderated content violated the TOS of the two leading app stores. 

Merge can allow crypto businesses to operate without the fear of shutdown by regulators et al but what's the guarantee that regulators won't shut down Merge itself?

In BNPL Ain't Killing Banks. It's Making Them Rich, I highlighted how Nonbank BNPLs are stealing a march over Bank BNPLs by effectively running a Point of Sale financing product as "Point of Aisle". 

By approving the loan in the time "it takes for a customer to go from the fitting room to the register", NAB seems to be operating in the Point of Aisle territory i.e. higher in the purchase funnel. If so, it's the first bank I know to do so.

On a side note, 'NAB Now Pay Later' is a great play on words. Kudos to NAB.

Regulation is the big elephant in the payments room. A merchant can do all he wants with his eStore's UX but he can't stop the regulator from throwing a spanner in the works with 2FA, SCA, Emandate, CoFT, and other measures that inject heavy friction into the payments journey.

This is only the beginning.

What's worse, if, despite SCA, fraud happens, I can bet that banks will pushback on customers saying "you've undergone SCA, you only must have made the payment" and fob off legitimate fraud claim / chargeback s/ disputes.

We will realize that SCA is there to protect the interest of banks, not consumers.

For a combination of cultural, technical and business reasons, EU will never adopt the Indian AA framework (or Aadhaar or UPI, etc.).

The pace at which EU regulation moves relative to fintech, my going in position is that any EU reg crosses its sell by date by the time it's implemented. In some ways, that's a corollary of the old saying, "When a software is fully tested and found bug free, it's obsolete".

zilch is easily the most ambitious company around for setting its sights on 100% penetration i.e. "125 million new customers" out of "TAM of 125 million users". Even some of the largest and most valuable companies on the planet like Amazon have less than 10% TAM penetration.