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The big elephant in the room is business model.

Since you mention UPI in India, in my latest post entitled Banks Have Not Lost The UPI Plot on my company blog, I point out banks in India have ceded UPI customer acquisition and merchant acquiring to Fintechs like PhonePe and PayTM because of drastic business model differences.

Banks operate on PLBS model and can't afford to make losses. Fintechs operate on VC model and can afford to not make profits. As long as Fintechs are able to raise VC funding, they will always be lot more aggressive than banks at customer acquisition and / or merchant acquiring even it means eating losses. I seriously doubt if banks will care much for A2A RTPs like UPI.

ProTip to Lee McNabb, Payments Strategy and Research at NatWest: Call Cardlytics. Over 2000 banks in USA use its technology to monetize credit card transaction data. 

According to a study, when the jargon was stripped out of it, a six page credit card T&C ballooned to 24 pages.

If it's concise, it will be hard to read. If it's easy to read, it will not be concise. This is a basic fact of life. Nobody who has actually written a contract can disagree.

IMO, this study is yet another attempt to deflect responsibility away from borrower and merchant, and shift the blame to the lender.

Any news on how much Venmo will charge for crypto trades? In a bearish outlook for Coinbase, The Motely Fool reported yesterday that Coinbase's fees of $2.99 for Bitcoin purchase worth $100 is too steep and predicted that the cryptoexchange is ripe for being disrupted by competitors with lower fees à la what Robinhood did for stocks. 

I agree with all of these areas of impact of cloud, but I think they apply only to banks - and not fintechs who're largely "cloud-native". (I can't think of a single onprem fintech.)

PS: I'm using the definition of Fintech given in my post entitled Why Banks Will Never Catch Up With Fintechs.

"What number do I dial if I want to speak to Europe" - Donald Rumsfled, ex Defence Secretary, USA.

What app do I open if I want to use Open Banking?

Yet another card network alternative that has shut down. What's new? 

Reinforces my long expressed opinion that A2A RTPs lack compelling value in developed markets that have well developed card based payments with high penetration of credit cards, debit cards and POS terminals. Credit Card payments offer rewards, deferred payments and a host of other benefits that A2A RTPs don't. While merchants keep ranting against high credit card interchange, not a single merchant I know gives a discount if customer pays with low / no interchange alternatives like debit card or an A2A RTP, so there's no great incentive for a customer using credit card to switch to A2A RTP.

I don't see any role of Open Banking in the shutdown of PingIt. Where A2A RTPs have done well, it has happened without Open Banking regulation e.g. AliPay and WeChat Pay in China; UPI in India; Venmo and Zelle in USA. If anything, PingIt's shutdown may portend the outlook for Open Banking A2A payment methods.

Bitcoin!!!

Hindsight is 20/20.

If banks actually put all these hurdles at the point of payment, customer will complain of friction and finsurgents will predict that banks will be wiped out by fintechs, and so forth. To paraphrase a recent FT bank-bashing puff piece:

* If banks take 3 days to clear a cheque, they're sponging off of your hard-earned money.

* If banks process a payment in realtime, they're making you lose your hard-earney money to fraud.

IMO, if govt wants to take the populist measure of taking responsibility away from the payer, then, along with banks, it should also hold the following parties responsible:  

TELCO: For giving a phone connection to scammer.

ISP: For giving Internet connection to scammer.

etc. 

Acquisitions are not only in future but also in the past of Financial Institutions, as I highlighted in Fintech Shouldn’t Stop Chanting The Disruption Mantra. 

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FI Innovation Playbook

Don't drink the Kool-Aid of every shiny new technology; Wait and watch for fintech winners; Buy / make only what works. This playbook has several success stories e.g. eCount in Prepaid Card, Revolution Money in Gift Card, Simple in Neobank, and Zelle in Online & Mobile Account-to-Account Payments.

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Some of the most widely used mobile payment apps in the world use QR codes e.g. Alipay and WeChat Pay in China; Google Pay, PhonePe and PayTM in India; and Starbucks and WalMart Pay in USA.

Curious to know the rails on which this new Facebook Pay is based. Some years ago, the payment functionality supported by Facebook worked off of TELCO / carrier billing and came with 560% fees, as I'd highlighted in Banks Have Nothing To Fear From TELCOs.