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Soon after the de/remonetization of high value currency notes in India in 2016, there was a severe cash crunch. To tide over the crisis, the government urged people to switch to digital payments and gave the example of a homeless person who started started accepting donations via PayTM, the largest mobile wallet in India (and perhaps the world). I cringed at this and thought how about eliminating the scourge of homelessness in the first place. Looks like it's here to stay everywhere. I'll now cringe less. 

What kind of transactions is this PUSH notification for? Debit card, Credit card or A2A transfers?

I think the state of affairs of chatbot is also a reflection of the oft-forgotten fact that there's only so much banking an average customer wishes to do. Offering 3X channels is not going to magically increase the customer's banking transaction volumes by 3X. Another related comment is here.

Oh it showed up almost 20 years ago. In what's considered to be one of the most egregious examples of burning through capital, PayByTouch shut down after taking $175M in VC funds in the early 2000s. It's extremely hard to make a non-deterministic authentication method like fingerprint work in near real time at scale in a queue-based environment like instore checkout. Let's see how this goes.

Great post. Resonates very well with my experience of seeing fintechs trying to sell to banks. Big reason for the disconnect I've observed is, fintechs rely on Innovators and Early Adopters whereas most midsize to large banks belong to Early Majority and Late Majority stages of the technology adoption lifecycle / chasm.

On a side note, why can't you "deliver stimulating and intelligent insights and demonstrate a clear understanding of your audience’s business needs" in a PowerPoint deck? According to unconfirmed reports about the origins of PowerPoint, Christopher Colombus used a PowerPoint slide deck to present his business plan to Queen Isabella for exploration of the New World:) 

I bought travel insurance with a single click on Expedia back in 2000. 

AXA Fizzy - The New Kid On The Blockchain

With AIB, it's confirm existing details, input traveler information, blah, blah, blah, click five times. 

Am very curious to know which customer segment would jump thru' so many hoops to buy travel insurance from AIB in 2018.

Kudos to Barclays Business Banking. Sensible approach. But it will work only if Relationship Managers are really capable of and geared up to doing all these nice things. Which is not the case with RMs at many banks. At the bank where I have my company's business account, I usually prefer the chatbot. The human RM does no-show for meetings and the CX only goes down the drain from there on.

"Just having Open Banking will not stimulate innovation on its own. You have to collaborate to stimulate innovation." LOL I thought Open Banking forced collaboration! 

"This Open Letter highlights what is missing from Open Banking and what needs to be done now to ensure its success." Blockchain can help to ensure success of Open Banking. Open Banking Needs A Blockchain Boost

No, it absolutely won't.

Over the last ten years or so, we’ve being hearing that, unless traditional banks do something about X, “players from outside banking will become the primary providers of financial services.” Over this period, X has changed – from mobile banking and chatboat through to AI and Blockchain – but the threat has flopped consistently. Instead, financial services has remained the most profitable sector in FORTUNE 500 year after year. Big 6 banks in USA have paid $110B in fines for the GFC (https://twitter.com/GTM360/status/992380932135976960) but are more profitable than before. The banking industry has also started outperforming the broader market on one more metric now viz Return to Shareholders (https://twitter.com/s_ketharaman/status/989527153783033856). By now, one would’ve hoped that the finsurgents would’ve seen the writing on the wall and stopped making silly threats. But, alas, one would be wrong. 

What Open Banking will do is to give banks another opportunity to use their tried-and-tested innovation playbook: Don't drink the Kool-Aid of every shiny new technology; Wait & watch for fintech winners; Buy / make only what works. We saw it earlier in Prepaid Card with eCount, in Gift Card, with Revolution Money; in Neobank with Simple; and most recently, in Mobile Wallet, with Zelle. This playbook works very well. Direct-to-Consumer Fintechs chant the disruption mantra only to raise VC funds at frothy valuations. The moment they get an opportunity to flip their companies, they sell out to traditional banks - and out goes all their song and dance about taking care of consumers' interest yada yada yada.  Consumers may be justified in wanting traditional banks to up their game but they're naive to expect Open Banking to achieve that.

@David Godfrey:

TY for your comment.

I’m familiar with standalone modulus check e.g. https://www.iban.com/uk-payment-validation-service.html from even prior to FPS. However, memory serves, it's not mandatory for FPS solutions at individual banks to call that service or validate the account number-sort code combo in any other way before allowing the payment to be submitted. But I could be mistaken. If that validation has now become mandatory for all banks, that's an useful enhancement to FPS.

But I agree that this validation is mere lipstick! Customer will gain real comfort only if the system confirms to them prior to submitting an FPS payment that the Intended Beneficiary Name entered by Payor matches the Actual Beneficiary Name. Back then, banks used to say, Beneficiary Name Verification is not possible because Beneficiary Bank won't reveal names of its customers for reasons of confidentiality / competition. In the PSD2 / Open Banking era, getting the mere name of a customer should be a piece of cake and we might see faster progress on this feature now:)