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For years, I've been feeling that we're barking up the wrong tree with regard to financial inclusion. More at Calling B.S On Banking The Unbanked. The coronavirus crisis has exposed the futility of past efforts focused on getting more people a bank account. With reports of some Americans without a bank account getting their corona relief checks earlier than some Americans with a bank account, it's clear that financial inclusion has more to do with features and functionality of bank accounts that people already have than on getting bank accounts to more people.

On a side note, keen on knowing the emphasis of digital in "digital job coach". Does it mean coaching a person for a digital job (digital-job coach) OR digitally coaching a person for a job, any job, digital or analog (digital job-coach)?

Whoa kudos to WestPac for going beyond Virtual Agents and Chatbots to attempt a Virtual Advisor. 

In Can Chatbots Replace Humans?, I had outlined the Query-Request-Complaint framework for Customer Service and posited that Chatbots can replace Human Agents in Queries, can match Human Agents in Requests but will lag Human Agents in Complaints for the forseeable future.

Wendy might just prove my last proposition wrong. 

@Melvin Haskins:

It could be argued that China Union Pay credit and debit cards sorta killed Visa and MasterCard long before QR-based AliPay and WeChat Pay became ubiquitous.

(For the uninitiated, AliPay and WeChat Pay are A2A RTPs that don't use the card rails beyond the onetime activity of authenticating bank account ownership by using the debit card).

But the China model hasn't gathered traction outside China for nearly 10 years. So I'm not convinced that what happened in China will happen in the RoW for the forseeable future. 

There are so many Visa / MasterCard card-linked payment methods that work via QR codes e.g. PayTM, PayZapp in India; Starbucks & WalMart Pay in USA. Why would QR codes kill Visa / MasterCard? 

My bank in India - the Indian subsidiary of a Top 5 UK Bank - has already started offering food and medicine delivery during the pandemic. Opportunistic move, innovative even, presses the "we're in this together" button well but I haven't found a single compelling reason to order food and medicine via my bank as against ordering them directly from the underlying service providers themselves. OTOH, if I did order food via my bank and something happened to the order, I'd eternally be blaming my bank for bungling even "such a small thing" and wondering if I can entrust it with the really big and critical things in life like money, wealth, and so on. 

While I hear you, I also advise caution on the part of banks. When their capacities are already under strain due to limited branch staff attendance, it's tricky to enter new, uncharted territories.

An Indian ministry has issued a notification highlighting the following features of Zoom:

* Passwordless entry

* Instant re-entry after broken Internet connection

* Anyone can share screen

* One user can change settings for another user

* Support for file transfer

CX Enhancers or Security Vulnerabilities? You decide. 

In response to all the security concerns expressed about it, Zoom recently announced that it was suspending all new feature development for the next 90 days and focusing solely on fixing the security holes. Some experts have predicted that, once Zoom does that, it will have all the friction hotspots that WebEx, GTM, Google Hangouts and other incumbent VC platforms have been having all these years. I tend to agree with them. Like with digital payments, nobody has cracked the Holy Grail of delivering both security and convenience at the same time. But only time will tell... 

Don't Use 2FA. With Or Without SMS. 

Here's why: Two Factor Authentication Is A “Conversion Killer” & “Blood Pressure Booster".

(hyperlink to post on my company website removed to comply with Finextra Community Rules but this post should appear on top of Google Search results when searched by its title)

Regulators can use the present coronavirus crisis as the fall guy and withdraw their 2FA / SCA mandates without losing face.

I was wondering why such an early cancelation announcement and the last paragraph answered it.