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We've been hearing for a long time that Japan (along with South Korea) has a lead of 5-6 years over the West in mobile payments. At the same time, according to Life in Japan: Where cash is king, cash is still heavily used in Japan. I don't see this as a contradiction. Instead, I see it as evidence of my long-held view that consumers are comfortable with multiple payment options. It also debunks the finsurgent notion that a newer payment method (e.g. mobile payment) will kill an older payment method (e.g. cash).

Great advice. Every now and then, a wannabe entrepreneur approaches us with an idea for an aggregation-based startup. Very often, it turns out they're solving their own problem rather than their customer's problem. So far, we've been politely telling them not to waste their time. Going forward, I'll simply refer them to this post! I'm guessing that, out of the 5K-6K fintech startups, fewer than 10-20 will survive your four filter criteria of a potentially successful fintech startup.

I thought CRM has gotten well past its initial adoption challenges by now. But, per this Gartner blog post, it looks like I was too optimistic: 

CRM efforts still fail for most companies

The spread of IoT will only be limited by the imagination of its suppliers / customers. Re. bargain hunter, LBS deal apps have been around for years, with GPS serving as the "location tracker". Not sure what's the role of IoT here. 

@JoãoBohner:

Surely not. The corresponding LOBs or SBUs - with some overlaps between them - would be:

• Retail Banking: Checking Account, Mortgage, Mutual Fund, Certificate of Deposit, Mutual Fund
• Corporate Banking: Checking Account
• Investment Banking: Credit Default Swap, Collateralized Debt Obligation.

@JoãoBohner: TY for the A2A. In the context of Banking, "product" means Checking Account, Mortgage, Certificate of Deposit, Mutual Fund, Credit Default Swap, Collateralized Debt Obligation, etc. A car has various specs. viz. engine capacity, ABS, 4WD, boot capacity, etc. Likewise, a banking product has various specs. viz. Tenor, Interest Rate, Maturity Date, etc. Hope this answers your question. 

This totally reflects the degree of independence from banking rails and, thereby, disruption potential, of the various fintech segments. As for banking and personal finance, it's amazing how this segment even managed to attract 5% of investments, given that it comprises merely of good old banks that show up via snazzy mobile apps.

Good to see HSBC on Twitter. From personal experience of tweeting to various banks, HSBC was the last social media holdout.

"As the fee of the debit card transaction is fixed, the cashback does not cost the retailer anything extra" aka no extra fee for cashback part of the card transaction. That explains it. Ask the retailer to put through another transaction, solely for cashback, let's see how many retailers find handling cash costlier than the fee on the card transaction, and agree to give cashback.

The last time I checked, this article covers 2014, 2015 and 2020. That sounds like future to me. Denying the future just because it doesn't corroborate past predictions, has never been a good strategy.