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 "chequered career": Mix of successes and failures.

Last startup Tow failed. Current startup Fast failed. Seems like a serial failure than chequered career?

On a side note, I thought @axios captured the zeitgeist well: "FAST ignored cash burn. It assumed VC gravy train would keep rolling. This startup strategy paid off for 10+ years. But things have changed. The longest-ever game of musical chairs has finally ended."

Great post. Normally posts of this nature spread FUD without getting into specifics. Kudos for taking the specific example of React Native and doing a teardown of the specific problem.

Millions of Brits risking fraud by ignoring Confirmation of Payee warnings

TIL that CoP already issues warnings regarding ID of Payee, just that most Payors ignore it. 

Suggests that ID doesn't matter too much in curbing APP Scam.

Exhibit A of my saying "Too much security quickly degenerates into too little security". 

If banks decline APP Scam claims if said payments were made even after CoP issued warnings, payors may be more circumspect with said warnings.

With all the laws regulators had for ages, they could not prevent billions upons billions of AML fraud by the highly regulated DBs and UBSs of the world.

In the spirit of proof of work and proof of stake, regulators should be made to provide "proof of competence" with enforcement of existing regulation before they can be allowed to pass new regulation.

Because of their lower interchange fees, Merchants have always loved A2A RTPs like PayByBank, PayM, Zapp. If A2A RTPs answer the long-pending question "What's in it for consumers to switch to them from credit card?", I'm guessing there will be no need for intervention by regulator to stimulate their adoption.   

UPI, India's A2A RTP blockbuster hit, answered that question with "ubiquity", which was driven by widespread availability of bank accounts compared to very low penetration of credit card and POS terminals (among other factors). But that positioning won't work in UK and other Western nations that have high penetration of credit card and POS.

Klarna - the Plaid of EU?

Keen to know how Klarna will gather banking creds and banking data of its users. While Plaid distributes the gathered banking data via API, it gathers them via phishing and scraping respectively. 

No brainer that your company hawks such a Digital ID solution?

Fraud is wrong framing of the problem and ID is wrong solution for the real problem.

Zelle, the A2A of USA, makes it crystal clear that, as long as the customer has authorized the payment, it's a Scam and not a Fraud. So, fraud is the wrong framing of the real problem. Maybe in a nod to this, the recent webinar on Finextra on this topic did call it APP Scam.

ID matters in the case of Fraud. But, in all the cases of APP Scams that I've come across, what seems to matter is the purpose for which the payee tells me to send the money to her. If the purpose is kosher, I don't need to care about the payee's ID. Like, I buy hundreds of things from Amazon and I don't know the name of a single Amazon employee. OTOH, if the purpose is not kosher, I don't see how it helps to know the payee's ID. 

Can you give an example of where your firm's ID solution has been used to prevent an APP Scam (not Fraud)?

Oil industry accepts many of these objections as genuine, as witnessed by the common practice in the industry of ignoring vast reserves of oil since the cost of extracting them is prohibitively high. Since Data is the new Oil, the same objections may also be accepted for Data.

Whoa! Kudos to UK Tech sector.