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Nice post. AmEx may not be able to help with this but there's another important imperative for fintech startups: Develop products that consumers really want instead of yet another checking account or debit card or PFM or...:)

@AnirudhRaghavendra: 

Cheque imaging is required because cheques are still around.

And why are cheques still around?

Part of the answer lies in your question. 

1. Next to cash, cheque is the most frictionless method of payment.
2. If customers really want frictionless and realtime payments, cash can't be beaten. As DB Research noted, cash is the only form of realtime payment that accomplishes transfer of value between payor and payee without any dependency on bank, hardware, software, network, battery, and other third parties.
3. Personally, I need to make a payment on 7th of every month and another payment on 10th of every month. There's no way I can guarantee availability of server, Internet or me on those days for making a realtime payment via RTGS/IMPS. So, I schedule them in advance via NEFT. Do I care for realtime payments? No.
4. During the implementation of FPS for a Top 5 UK Bank, we predicted that FPS would kill BACS within 2-3 years of launch of FPS in 2008. Nothing like that happened. Instead, UK customers didn't care too much for realtime payments; BACS volumes grew steadily and reached a peak a couple of years ago.

I see a growing belief that realtime payments is merely a hygiene factor.

When somebody says "I'll write a cheque", it doesn't mean only "write by hand". It's a metaphor for filling the cheque, whether in wet ink or via printer.

With that out of the way, a payer that prints a cheque needs only to know the payee's name. Not having to collect, store and process the payee's account number, sort code, etc. is the major advantage of cheque. What QR code can it print with just the payee's name? With whatever QR code that it can print with just the payee's name, how will the payee be able to use a smartphone QR code scanner to deposit that cheque into their bank account? 

Banks issue blank cheques to business customers who write the amount and beneficiary name on individual cheques later. Who will print the QR code that's beneficiary-specific?

"However, as the wholesaler had paid with VANs, the eNett team were able to recover all the funds within nine days through chargebacks." Correct me if I'm wrong but the said Australian travel wholesaler would've recovered its US$ 190,000 even if it had swiped / dipped its plastic credit card on an All Leisure Group's POS machine. To me, the key to this recovery in this context seems to be the use of a method of payment that supports chargeback, not digital. As a matter of fact, most digital methods of payments like ACH and wire transfers are irrevocable, don't support chargeback, and wouldn't have helped the said Australian travel wholesaler recover said amount if they were used for this payment.

@JoãoBohner:

I really don't know how the anti-shoplifting system works or how resource-intensive it is or how much friction it poses - apart from knowing that it does prevent shoplifting and is therefore a complement to Scan & Go, which is the subject of this blog post and of my original question about how Scan & Go addresses the age-old issue of pilferage. 

RFID-based solution may be practical. But, as I mentioned earlier, it'd make Scan & Go redundant.

Actually, Amazon does not have mountains of cash at all.

I remember reading once that Amazon is perpetually running on a cashflow treadmill and remains afloat because of the float between its collections from customers on Day One and payments to suppliers after 90-120 days. According to YCHARTS, AMZN's Quarterly FCF has ranged between a high of $8.646B and low of -$3.582B (average: only $1.157B).

The way I see it, the only way AMZN can get into marketplace lending business in a big way is by borrowing from banks, in which case it'd simply become a reseller of banks.  

Also, in recent times, traditional banks have cut back on loans to sellers on leading ecommerce platforms in India, so if AMZN wants in on this business, it's really only bottom-feeding on the rejects of traditional banks. 

TIL: Weight-check or human verification are two ways to prevent shoplifting in "Scan & Go" store checkout solutions (no RFID required). http://lnr.li/09WkV/

@RobertoGaravaglia:

TY for the clarification.

As they say, proving the negative is one of the toughest things in law. But, we're not yet there. The challenge is in explaining this to the common man well before and doing it in a simple manner. Without that, consumer adoption of PFM might be a big challenge.  

@DharmeshMistry: 

Alibaba's success in China in finserv is purely a transaction success and has nothing to do with experience paradigm. According to Chris Skinner's article titled The Truth About Ant Financial, Alibaba's success in China is of enabling finserv for people who don't have bank accounts and whom banks won't touch with a forty feet bargepole. Going by anecdotal evidence, Alibaba owes a lot of its success to "lightbrush regulation" vis-a-vis KYC and source of funds.