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Any idea how successful UK law enforcement has been in nabbing the fraudsters after the victim reports the fraud?

Per reports, law enforcement is achieving good success in doing so in the case of the corresponding UPI Fraud in India and is able to retrieve the lost money if the victim contacts it within 4-5 "golden hours" of getting defrauded.

It's only finserv in some countries and rail-specific, I guess. QR code based payments are very popular in India (and China) for A2A, where they solve the pain area of low penetration of credit card and of POS terminals. That said, Bharat QR for credit card payment has received lukewarm response in India. In USA, where both credit card and POS have high penetration, QR code for A2A is a solution seeking a problem whereas QR for credit card is supported by payment apps like Starbucks, Walmart, and Zelle. 

Banks do use a lot of data. As I highlighted in Banks Will Know Chipotle Is Going Bankrupt Before Chipotle, banks are choosy about where they will use data - in general, tech - and where they will not. 

Is this investing advice?

According to a study, the percentage of companies that rated their ERP project a success shot up from 58% in 2015 to 88% to 2019. They key reason for the increase was "To avoid reputational damage coming from failure, companies redefine success as whatever they get."

That goes exactly against your "#1. Know what success looks like".

Even best practices seem to be changing with times!

The quoted Mr. Sanjiv Somani is a Director of 10X, per his LinkedIn Profile. 

For once, I really believed Google Plex had the potential to help coop banks and credit unions to disrupt megabanks - because when it says Google on the outside, nobody cares which small time bank is on the inside.

Sad to note that, let alone Fintech, even Big Tech is giving up its posturing of disrupting Banks! 

On a side note, Google's decision to "...deliver digital enablement for banks & financial services providers" instead of being "the provider of these services.” fits my definition of it being Fincumbent v Fintech perfectly!

Why Banks Will Never Catch Up With Fintechs

My Top 3 reasons for why Open Banking has flopped in EU: (1) Too much regulation narrowing down the playing field (2) Too little understanding by fintechs about the real value proposition of open banking (3) Too much obsession among fintechs about scraping v. API technologies. More in my comment here. 

As for how to rejuvenate it, Fintechs in EU just need to look across the pond. Without any regulation, there are 80M users in USA of "open finance" apps across free automated savings, free overdraft and free stock trading, to name just three hot areas where consumers have clearly seen the value proposition of handing over their banking data to Plaid, Finicity, Yodlee and other banking data aggregators. 

In BNPL Ain't Killing Banks. It's Making Them Rich, I highlighted how BNPLs in India have gained an edge over credit card by pivoting to "Point of Aisle" financing. Since then, the trend seems to be spreading worldwide, with leading BNPL apps like Klarna now looking like shopping apps and trying to hook consumers earlier in the purchase cycle than wait until the point of sale. 

I know the MasterCard BNPL news led to fall in the stock price of Affirm, PayPal, et al, but I can't help wondering if it's too little too late?

"vast majority of contactless txns in the UK are online".

Keen to know what contactless means in the context of online credit card payments? AFAIK, online credit card payments involve no contact, whether they're made with a plastic credit card having or not having contactless / NFC tech or not. So, the contactless / tap-and-go ceiling meant for brick-and-mortar payments is not applicable to online payments. Also, AFAIK, online credit card payments have no ceiling as long as they don't end up busting of the credit cardholder's credit limit.