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Ah, feels nice to know that someone thinks cash will be around even beyond the 190 years that I predicted in The Death Of Cash Is At Least 190 Years Away. 

"Not only does crime pay but it's just the cost of doing business". This was the line with which FORTUNE magazine ended an article about Archer Daniels Midland some 15-20 years ago. The food processing giant was fined - memory serves - $200 mn for rifampicin price fixing. Although I read this nearly two decades ago, this is one of my most memorable lines in business journalism. And, what's more, it's equally valid today. Like I pointed out in Why Nobody Went To Jail For The Great Financial Crisis, "the six largest US banks have paid at least $110 billion in penalties related to the (Great Financial) Crisis." Despite paying so many billions in fines, banking remains the most profitable sector in FORTUNE 500. 

I know but the source I referenced somewhat contradicts your second assertion "the larger the better". I wonder if the resolution of the conundrum lies in the proposition that it's extremely hard to create a representative sample of just 2000 if the population size is high i.e. makes it impossible to fulfill your first attribute.   

Re. "Make sure the size of a sample has some relation to the size of data that is interpreted." This is old wisdom that we've known for a long time.

However, lately, I find many sample sizes of ~2000 - regardless of the size of universe. When I looked around, I read in some random place that sample size beyond 2000 does not increase the confidence level of the results, however large the population beyond 20000.

This seems to contradict conventional wisdom. Keen to know your views on whether this is yet another example of "how to lie with statistics" or the outcome of some drastic advancement in the field of statistics that totally upends old wisdom about sample sizes.

Nice post. Resonates well with the value proposition boost PFMs would get by fulfilling, not just making, recommendations that I'd highlighted in A Killer Feature For PFM On The Eve Of PSD2. However, on the back of the FB-CA, I felt there's an explicit need for PFMs and other Fintechs to pay for data in Open Banking Needs A Blockchain Boost.

Looks like copywriting sleight-of-hand. Copy-pasting from Twitter:

I gotta hand it to Robinhood's copywriting staff. Their use of "checking and savings" has managed to dupe several major financial publications into promoting a falsehood to their readers that Robinhood will soon offer *banking* services to customers, when they're clearly not. https://twitter.com/BillWinterberg/status/1073285379678183425

On the ATMs of many Indian banks, it has been progressively possible beginning early 2000s to pay bills, book train tickets, topup prepaid mobile phones, make donations, apply for loans and avail oneself of many of the bank-in-a-box facilities. However, this reminds me of an old saying about ice creams: "There are 284 flavors of ice cream but 84% of ice cream sales are vanilla".

Likewise, more than 90% of ATM transactions are cash withdrawals. The thing is, ATM is a queue-based device, where so many people are there to withdraw cash within a few seconds. Mixing up other transactions that take several minutes defies the basic purpose of an ATM.

Not sure whether banks in UK have refrained from supporting more features on general-purpose ATMs out of apathy or whatever but, going by my observation in India, British banks are right in doing so - there's just too little adoption of non cash withdrawal features on an ATM.

That said, there's a case for equipping some ATMs with branch-in-a-box features aka Kiosks. On that count, I think British banks have done a good enough job. Over 10 years ago, both my banks in UK had at least two 24/7 kiosks just outside many of their branches. Not sure if they've shut down those Kiosks now due to poor adoption.

Nice post. 

"With megafunds like SoftBank, Temasek and TenCent entering the venture capital fray, megarounds have become common and risk of startup valuation bubble bursting has disappeared." ~ @eringriffith @nytimes 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/technology/venture-capital-mega-round.html

True dat but, to be fair, the second round of retailer apps seem to be better thought out. Instead of trying to provide purely monetary incentives by way of discounts, which is not a sustainable strategy in a low margin sector like retail, the second round of retailer apps seem to trying to drive adoption by throwing in non-monetary incentives like easier returns and line jumping, which are (arguably) more sustainable. Of course, these apps will qualify even less to be called payment apps than the first round of apps but, as long as they help retailers save on the MDR they pay to banks, what's in a name?

According to Bloomberg, US retailers are having another go at saving credit card MDR aka swipe fees by launching their own bank account-linked payment apps and incentivizing consumers to switch to them from their credit cards by offering discounts, easier returns, line jumping and other benefits. We know what happened to their first round payment apps like CurrentC. Only time will tell how their second attempt will pan out. On a side note, according to this article, the Starbucks mobile payment app "now represents 14 percent of the coffee chain’s transactions." That's a far cry from the grandiose predictions made by the digerati a few years ago.