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Lucky ABN / ICS. It's able to levy interest for just setting credit limits. Cardholders don't even seem to have to run up spends to use up the credit limits.

Sounds too much like Finextra:) Is there any plan to to "persuade" Finastra to look for another name?

Attract customers by promising a more frictionless experience by having lightbrush KYC. Get them to deposit money. Then tell them their account is frozen and ask them to face the additional friction of undergoing full KYC if they want their money back. May seem like cheating to some but Monzo makes PayPal proud.

Good job Monzo. Look forward to many more devious tricks from you.

From £2B to £70M, Monitise has gone a long way - downhill, that is. When the bank disruption mantra didn't work out, many fintechs started chanting the bank partnership mantra, which necessarily pits them against traditional suppliers of finserv technology. Now it looks like fintechs may lose that fight as well and get gobbled up by traditional finserv tech providers. Tch tch...

Great post. The importance of psychology in Conversion Rate Optimization is something that totally resonates with our experience.

In one instance involving digital sales of bank accounts, we saw huge abandonment when prospective customers had to select the type of bank account they wanted to open online. The menu showed three types of accounts with increasing list of features. Having seen such tables on websites of SAAS and other digital sales websites, the customer was psychologically conditioned to expect progressively higher costs for the three accounts. When they didn't see any mention of fees on the product table, customers were again psychologically conditioned to perceive this as "yet another example" of the use of hidden costs by banks. Not surprisingly, many of them bailed out of the account opening journey at this stage.

We advised the bank to post the fees for the three accounts clearly. They turned around and asked us, "What fees? All these accounts are free". This came as a shock! 

Apparently, the bank made progressively more money from the float on the progressively higher Average Quarterly Balances stipulated for the three accounts and therefore didn't need to charge any explicit fees. Displaying "Free!" on top of all the three accounts led to a significant increase in conversion rate of website visitors to account openers.

For those counting, just this one step on the customer journey had two psychological drivers of conversion. Since I'm not a trained psychologist, I can't be sure but I think they're both examples of "confirmation bias".

Notwithstanding the drivers, forgery must be a crime in whichever country this has happened. I wonder if all the 114 mortgage brokers who indulged in forgery will spend time behind bars. Of course, the bank can take part of the blame and can keep most of their jobs open until they're released from jail.

Oh, wait, can felony convicts work in a bank?

20K borrowers from 2M active sellers. That's just 1% penetration. That too among borrowers who "wouldn't otherwise qualify for a typical bank loan." And all this in 6 years. I don't know the exact figures but $3B in loans can't be more than 1 day's loan business of a global bank or 1 month's loan business of a regional bank. Maybe it's only me but either these figures are terribly wrong or this is extremely underwhelming performance from a Goliath like Amazon.

Good post. In my two decades' experience of working in the software industry, I've come across various terms to describe the basic unit of business functionality that can help companies assemble software systems from prebuilt items instead of developing them from scratch viz. component, service, microservice, etc. But one challenge has remained constant: What should be the right level of granularity of such an item.

Assuming that, somehow, someone cracks that Holy Grail, there are other hurdles to reusing microservices to build industrial-scale software systems viz. the ones highlighted in my recent blog post Why Is Software Still Built From Scratch?

There was talk of a cross-border payments regulator 20+ years ago. Regulator is geared up to stipulating FX rates, fees, delivery period, etc. However, problem is, in the event of an "SLA" breach, it's impossible to sue the service provider because of the involvement of multiple jurisdictions in a typical cross-border transaction. Idea was given up because there wasn't much point having a regulator without any enforcement teeth. The only way around this limitation I can think of from then to now is for ICC / ICJ types of UN judicial bodies in The Hague to open a separate wing to prosecute "international payments criminals" across all jurisdictions!

As the old saying goes, nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to do banking, they wake up in the morning wanting to buy a car. While it's interesting, your guidance flies in the face of advice given by all and sundry over the last few years to banks to make banking more invisble, seamless and joined up with the purchase of products for which financing is required. In fact, I've heard of ABM solutions that join up mortgages more closely with home buying than at present aka push banks into the background as it happens with vehicle purchasing. Apart from regulatory / compliance concerns, is there really any documentary evidence that a car buyer really cares which bank is providing the loan for buying the car? Or that they're willing to take the extra efforts to shop around for a car loan? With home loans, the ticket size is at least 10-30X that of car loans, so loan provider matters far more.