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@DharmeshMistry: 

According to popular opinion, Amazon has indeed killed Retail:) The real question is, has Amazon killed FMCG/CPG/etc., who are the "Manufacturers" in this context. Obviously, the answer is NO. Amazon wouldn't even try that - that'd be as suicidal as chopping off the branch on which one is sitting.

I've been using a bank's eTrading portal satisfactorily for all stock market activities for nearly 15 years. While I've a lot of cribs about the friction in all my banks' Internet Banking portals for a similar period, I still use them satisfactorily - more importantly, I don't crave to access my banking from a third-party Distributor portal.

Whereas, when it comes to products / services in many other sectors, I wouldn't gone digital if digital Distributors hadn't come up. I can't dream of buying my favorite laptop from the laptop brand's website; I can't dream of buying groceries from the website of my favorite brick-and-mortar retailer; ditto for apparels or telecom or insurance. In all those cases, if I go digital, it's always via the Distributor's portal e.g Amazon, PayTM, etc.

Contrary to popular opinion spread by finsurgents, I think Banking has done a far better job at enabling digital Distribution than many other sectors. 

How different is this card from the hundreds of merchant-cobranded cards launched over the decades? Did all those merchants push "further into the financial services sphere" with their cobranded cards??

All the action happens on the website. But customer has to call a telephone number if they have any any "doubts about the payment". How cool is that?

@JamesHiggins:

TY for your reply.

When I read "Without this guidance on standards, consumers will, ...", I thought you were referring to retail consumers.

From your line "With even the most cursory of glances at the finer points of PSD2, it is clear that this is a directive with the consumer and retail in mind. Removing the spotlight from the corporate sector is perhaps understandable.", I never thought you were referring to corporate customers.

Now coming to technical standards for data interchange, back in 2011, this was brought up as an issue. As I'd highlighted in my personal blog post How Many PFMs Do We Need at the time, there were at least two standards available at the time (apart from proxy login by PFM by using customer's online banking creds) viz. OFX and QIF. More recently, as I'd highlighted in my Finextra post, OFX-API is yet another standard.

IMO, data interchange standards are aplenty. The real problem lies in finding a way to objectively establish that PFM accessed only the permitted info and nothing more AND still maintain frictionless nature of PFMs, as touted by their vendors.

Henry Kissinger once said "The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault". Paraphrasing that line, "The nice thing about being McKinsey is that, if you don't understand what it says, you think it's your fault".

At the risk of being publicly faulted, I fail to understand how "distribution" can have its own margins and growth divorced from "manufacturing" in a regulated industry like banking where the manufacturer and / or regulator play a vital role in deciding the distribution margins and supply volumes?

Third-party PFM / MoMMAs like MINT have asked and received online banking credentials from millions of people. With these creds, they've been in a position to access every bit of banking info that accountholders can themselves access. This has been happening for over a decade. 

TBH, I fail to understand what's the big deal about lack of technical standards for customer data sharing in PSD2.

If everyone that deploys chatbots takes the trouble that CapitalOne has taken to learn what their chatbots have learned, chatbots will replace humans even faster than I'd imagined in Can Chatbots Replace Humans?

Coincidentally, on my adjacent browser tab, I have a press release from Persado, the leading provider of AI-generated marketing language for top global brands. Persado found that there were 250 ways of writing "Call now". That's beaten hollow by Eno's learning that there 2200 ways that customers have asked for balances!

I agree about the convenience of cheques. In fact, IME, cheque was the unsung hero of #CashlessIndia at the peak of #CurrencySwitch last year. But I disagree that their use is coming down, if that's the subtext of your post. In my post Why Branch And Digital Channels Will Coexist Forever, I've recounted my conversation with a banker, according to whom increase in use of cheques in business banking is a major reason why her bank is expanding its branch network.

@Anon: TY for correcting my impression that MINT pioneered account aggregation / PFM. 

Given some of the humans I interact with everyday, I wish Gartner's prediction came true tomorrow. Can Chatbots Replace Humans?