Community

"UK's top banks could be sitting on a massive cash windfall." Good. It will come to use if they're slapped with the next billion dollar fine!

"alive": Does he mean "live" or, sensing that people may already have doubts about its survival, "alive and kicking"? 

"credit card": I thought Atom Bank was a mobile-only bank? How can it have plastic?

"introduction of residential mortgage loans distributed through intermediaries": Who wants to bet that these intermediaries won't be mobile-only? I thought mobile-only bank was going to disintermediate everybody else, how come it needs a brick-and-mortar intermediary for distributing its own product?

@HiteshThakkar + 1, for more countries viz. Germany, UK, USA, where I've had personal experience with SWIFT infra setups. In fact, one of my past employers was a SWIFT partner and it was incumbent even upon us to reiterate SWIFT's stipulation for secure setups.

In a free market, customers can't unilaterally decide what is a fundamental right and what is not. Besides, even if something is a fundamental right, it doesn't have to be available for free. All of us - including Matthew D - seem to be forgetting that realtime payments are already available in many parts of the world - India (RTGS), UK (CHAPS), USA (FedWire) - just that you got to pay for it.

Great app. While PayZapp from HDFC Bank has reduced my bill payment woes substantially (HDFC Bank's PayZapp Ends My Bill Payment Woes), Plastiq takes frictionless payments to the next level. I'm eagerly awaiting its Android version.

Not sure why other commenters missed out what the article mentions clearly, namely, that Plastiq's 1-2.5% fees include the facility to pay *ANY* bill via credit / debit cards even if the billers themselves don't accept credit / debit card. That's a great benefit. Every month, I lose the opportunity to earn rewards because many of my billers don't accept credit cards (e.g. office and home landlords). With Plastiq, I can charge those bills to my credit card and start earning rewards.

I don't mind paying 1-odd % fees for the benefits delivered by Plastiq. However, I'm reasonably sure I wouldn't need to pay anything: Like in the case of BillGuard, I'm quite sure some VC or the other would give Plastiq enough funding and tell them to waive its fees for up to a certain number of bills a month.

PFMs do ask for Online Banking credentials, whether they're based on scraping architecture or APIs. When I came across this step on Mint, I bailed out. But, judging by the popularity of Mint, millions of Americans have evidently gone ahead. Social logon merely authenticates a user by their Twitter / Facebook creds to a third party site - basically confirm that you are who you claim you are. Apps like HootSuite that post content to / retrieve content from social networks do require your corresponding social network creds. Maybe it's only me but handing over my social network creds to a HootSuite type of app is one thing but handing over my online banking creds to a PFM is a wholly different thing. 

First we had social commerce apps e.g. try out a new dress at a store and invite comments from friends about how it looks on you. I haven't heard much about them in recent times. Let's see how this "social uncommerce" app fares!

A great and concrete example of a bank-fintech partnership that solves a key customer problem. Kudos to DBS, Funding Societies and Moolah Sense. And hope to see many more examples like this.

@JamesBosley: I'm tired of hearing that mobile payments will become mainstream the next year for more than 5-6 years. I hope you're right so that I don't have to hear this statement any more. But I'm quite sure you're wrong because, from my personal experience, consumer Internet products either enjoy a fast growth or suffer a slow death. Slow growth is not a thing in this field.

"The only thing that has been missing from the Swiss army knife that is the smart phone is the ability to make payments." Sorry but I can't help wondering if you've been living under a rock for the past few years. JFYI, mobile wallets have been around for almost 10 years. Pundits have been predicting for at least the past 5 years that "mobile payments will become mainstream next year". Despite that, mobile payments constitute a negligible share of total retail payments volumes - 0.2% in USA in 2015, per NYT. There's also no justification to believe that mobile payments will grow in future. In fact, there's greater justification to believe exactly the opposite - per Finextra, Apple Pay Year 2 usage was lower than Year 1 usage.