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As the old saying goes, banks will lend money to people who don't need it. OTOH, people who do need money will be declined by banks and need to go to the Zongas of the world, who will charge usurious interest rates as a feature, not a bug. As long as they keep the regulator at bay - the way Uber and AirBnB have managed to do - these fintechs will be fine. But the moment the regulator applies the same rules that are applied to banks, many of these fintechs will lose their raison d'être and come crashing down.

Given all the technology the remittance industry has purportedly used, can you share any examples of cross border remittance services that enable an entity in USA to send money in *fiat currency* to the *bank account* of another entity in India in realtime? "Entity" is Consumer or Business / Company, so there are four cases in total viz. C2C, C2B, B2C and B2B. PS: Not interested in Bitcoin, hence "fiat currency" is an operative term; likewise, not interested in closed wallets like PayPal, so "bank account" is another operative term.

Neobanks typically have one or two products and 4-5 figure customer counts. While I don't know HSBC's plans, there are other traditional banks who have announced full-feature digital only banks with plans to acquire 10s or 100s of millions of customers. I'm not surprised they've opted for the BUILD route - the difference in scope and scale between neobanks and digital banks of traditional banks is too stark for traditional banks to risk the BUY option, especially at the kind of frothy valuations of VC-funded neobanks.

Sounds more like putting the pivot / diversification / courting lipstick on the soon-to-shutdown pig. If so, Starling won't be the first neobank that started off with the mission to kill traditional banks, failed at that, then pivoted to become supplier of fintech to the banking industry, failed even at that, and finally faded away after selling its tech to one single bank. On a side note, I'm surprised that Wonga didn't think of a similar ruse. 

https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/32591/wonga-enters-administration/retail

Interesting post. As I highlighted in Flight Delay Insurance - Why Blockchain?, I too haven't come across any truly decentralized blockchain that fulfills the promise of trustlessness. But crypto enthusiasts point out one big exception to this notion: The Mother of All Blockchains, Bitcoin. 

GoCompare Money should know that "a potentially toxic mix of growing contactless payments coupled with the rapid demise in paper current account statements is causing some people to lose track of their spending" is a Feature, not a Bug!

In his book Flash Boys, Michael Lewis gives an example of an American investment bank that downloaded open source code related to algo trading, modified it inhouse, but didn't submit the modified code back to the open source foundation. Would be interesting to know if the code uploaded by Scotia Bank to GitHub is developed from scratch by Scotia Bank or is of the nature of modified code mentioned in Flash Boys.

Moral of Story: Robo-Advisory technology should go wide, not deep. Technology Platform - Go Wide Or Go Deep? 

Going by initial reports I highlighted in my blog post Open Banking Needs A Blockchain Boost, Open Banking seems to be a damp squib in Europe / UK. This is the first time I've heard the notion that banks will be forced to adopt Open Banking in order to "compete with innovations coming from fintechs". TBH, I totally fail to see how. The way I see it, fintechs will have nothing to offer if they don't get Open Banking access to account info of bank customers. Can you give 2-3 examples of such innovations from fintechs that will *force* banks to adopt Open Banking?

@FinextraMember: I've given numbers in my previous comment to explain why I think banking is more competitive than retail. Profitability is driven by how well an industry is run. Retailers make measly profits probably because they're run poorly - I don't know. In any case, how much profit Visa made is absolutely irrelevant in a free market. On a side note, it's not just card fees. Retailers tend to swallow other external cost reductions as well. The Indian government has just instituted a probe against many QSR retailers for failing to pass on steep reduction in Goods & Services Tax from 18% to 5%.