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In USA, Plaid harvests banking creds by Phishing and collects bank account info by Scraping. They said that can't happen in EU because of PSD2 etc. But, then, Tink, the only aggregator that seems to have got some traction in EU does use scraping, not API.

There's too much gap between theory / regs and practice / traction.

You may tell companies to focus on security first but the successful companies are doing exactly the opposite of that.  

I've always believed that customers don't give a damn about security. After the Visa-TINK M&A, I'm wondering if EU regulators don't, either.

London fintechs enjoy record VC investment

Enough said about my prediction that Brexit won't kill UK / London Fintech!

The article is silent about UPI-based mobile wallets / mobile payment apps in India. While we keep hearing about UPI payment volume and value, I can't find any user count figures handily. But, between leading apps PhonePe, Google Pay, et al, I wouldn't be surprised if there are 200M UPI users in India. 

But there's a challenge in using these stats to make inferences about current or future users: Overlap in usage. Many AliPay users also have WeChat Pay. Many PayTM users also have PhonePe and Google Pay. It's very difficult to say how many unique mobile payment users are there. 

Besides, many / most mobile payment users also use cash in all countries (except perhaps China, Sweden), so it's difficult to substantiate the extent of cash displacement by mobile payment apps with high level stats.

I don't know how old your $7B figure is but it's definitely not the latest. ICYMI, Robinhood just filed for IPO at an expected valuation of $30-40B.

Re. 26,5 trillion dollars, you first call it "value", which makes it a STOCK-equivalent metric like market cap but then you compare it with GDP of USA and China, which is a FLOW-equivalent metric like Revenues. Obviously the same figure can't be both Stock and Flow. Which of the two is it?

I have a solution that would prevent these types of financial transaction mistakes from happening and it's by requiring management to cough up fines from their own pockets.

It's 2021, it's extremely lame for one of the largest banks in the world to let such technical glitches happen.

FINRA recenty fined RobinHood for, among other infractions, wrongly posting a 6-figure debit balance in a customer's account, who committed suicide when he saw the huge debt he owes on margin trading. 

I hope the regulator slaps a similar fine on JPMC for this snafu - and also that the fine is docked to the management's pay. 

Hope some overzealous reg doesn't put a stop to Revolut's gamification - the way Robinhood was told to stop the confetti shower on its stock trading app!

On a side note, ICICI Bank in India rewards banking activity with Payback Points. Not quite as fungible as blockchain based loyalty program but arguably more valuable than points that can be redeemed only with the bank that issues it. 

LOL I expect exactly the opposite.

While other aggregators in USA were focusing on best practices like token-based account authentication and API-based data access, Plaid uses phishing to harvest credentials and scraping to gather data, a strategy that helped it grow more rapidly and steal a march over its rivals. Given Visa's love for Plaid, I'm guessing it showed interest in Tink because Tink uses scraping. We all know the problems with scraping but that hasn't stopped the scrappy technology from being the driver of success of many aggregation companies so far. 

In any case, AFAIK, PSD2 does not forbid scraping.

A light brush regulator blocked the Visa-Plaid deal in USA. Wonder what are the chances of the arguably more heavy brush regulator approving the Visa-Tink deal in EU. 

On a side note, given that Tink "connects to more than 3,400 banks", how come it's serving only "300 banks"? 

Credit Card payments are on the upswing in India. A2A / UPI has cannibalized Debit Card and has gained additional volumes by digitalizing the payment supply chain. Virtually 100% of merchants I visit accept UPI and / or Credit Card, whether they have POS terminals or not. I haven't given much thought to the number of POS in India from a macroeconomic perspective. When I last checked, India had a digital payment penetration rate of only 20-25%, so I'd say there's a HUGE headroom for growth of UPI and I can directionally believe RBI's bullish outlook for UPI although I'm not aware of the exact numbers forecasted by RBI.

Keen to know why these 143,000 account holders didn't download a statement of account by themselves just before they left Monzo. Or did Monzo fire them and revoke their account access suddenly without prior notice? If so, no amount of Open Banking / Open Finance will help them get their SOA.  

At the risk of expressing an unpopular opinion, transaction history is built jointly by customers and banks and should therefore belong jointly to both parties. Customers shouldn't be given a monopoly over this data.