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For the nth time, this shows there's nothing broken with plastic. In fact, pure play mobile wallets like PayTM are launching plastic cards these days! To imagine that the ludicrous punditry had claimed in 2012 Why the iPhone 5 means the end of the swipe and cards. LOL. 

Merchants probably deserve what they got vis-a-vis not being the first point of contact for customers filing chargeback claims. IME, of late, it has become very difficult to contact many merchants, especially the new-age digital ones e.g. (1) Amazon India used to accept customer queries via email until last year, whereas now it has stopped providing email support. More at https://twitter.com/s_ketharaman/status/941646575469780993 (2) Ola Cab. Six months ago, it shut down its telephone support. The only way to contact the company is via its mobile app and, if you can't select one of the pre-existing options on the app, you're out of luck (3) Ditto with Uber, which never provided telephone support but has lately stopped providing email support as well.

While banks don't distinguish themselves with customer service, at least they're available on multiple channels including web, phone, social media, email, and branch.

Ergo it's much easier to contact a bank than many merchants. TBH, merchants - especially new age digital merchants - deserve to suffer more chargebacks. You reap as you sow, and all that.

@Philip Andreae: LOL. Teaches people to be careful of the metaphors they select!

Nice post. I think there's an "at" missing in the title of this post. Despite selling technology all my working life, I think "...it's not AT all about the technology":) 

I think Gartner is just politely saying that, with the accelerating pace of automation, humans won't have much money left by 2030!!!

Jokes apart, Bill Gates confidently declared that "banks are dinosaurs" in 1994. Since then, bank operating revenue has tripled, earnings have quadrupled, equity capital has quintupled, and profits have hit a record high of $50B in 1Q2018. 

Let's see what happens with another confident declaration by another famous entity.

This just out: 'Old' IT skills still relevant in India.

This article offers a clue of what's missing in the legacy migration narrative: Banks are able to find legacy skills from their technology outsourcing partners.

It also hints at another challenge with this narrative: Open systems to which legacy systems are supposed to be migrated are based on C++, Java, etc., which are themselves over 20 years old and have started showing the characteristics of mainframe systems.

This tweet thread also exposes why problems often attributed to legacy systems can happen equally well with modern systems.

Lack of trained manpower and other issues with legacy systems are nothing new. The German bank that faced them in 2002 probably still runs on mainframe 16 years later. 

6 Reasons Why Banks Can't Transform Legacy Applications

Still the sky hasn't fallen. OTOH, we're hearing that 75% of legacy migration projects have failed. IMO, the migration narrative is missing something BIG. 

@Russell Bell: 

TY for the detailed clarification. Maybe that's not your intention but it reinforces my belief that "core devs" resembles a secret cabal. While there may be hundreds or even thousands of core devs and nodes, they're likely to be outnumbered 100:1 or more by digital currency owners aka "normal users". The way the governance model appears to me, normal users don't seem to have any visibility into / control over what's happening to the Blockchain vis-a-vis mining rewards, bug fixes, hard forks, etc. Blockchain is surely more decentralized than one Microsoft taking all decisions on Windows but it's also not as decentralized or egalatarian as its enthusiasts portray it. 

While on the subject of governance, I just stumbled upon two interesting takes:

1. Decred, which bills itself as an "autonomous digital currency", uses a censorship-resistant blockchain-anchored public proposal system called Politeia (Pi) as the bedrock of its governance.
2. IDEX, a self-proclaimed decentralized cryptoexchange, blocks all trades from NY, which means it's not decentralized, per The Block.

Hope you find them interesting.

Not sure why Mobile-based authentication is the future of finance. It's an old technology - I wrote about it back in 2013 - Mobile OTP: Cyanide Or Caffeine For Online Payments?. Five years later, I'm fairly convinced that it's closer to cyanide and not caffeine. Mobile is a moving part over which neither the FI nor ISP or Customer has any control. It screws up UX and kills conversion. 

@Philip Andreae: Good question. I felt the same in Flight Delay Insurance - Why Blockchain?. I won't claim to understand much of it but I know Blockchain enthusiasts tout concepts like decentralized governance, DAO, etc., as a way to carry out governance outside of a centralized body. Then I keep hearing about "Core Devs", who are the programmers of a particular Blockchain. I wonder why they're not a manifestation of a centralized body. As things stand, at least to me, Blockchain has more questions than answers.