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Looks like even a giant like VISA has problems partnering with TELCOs. 

Banks Have Nothing To Fear From TELCOs

All the more reason why neobanks should widen their appeal to other market segments: 

Will Millennials Bankrupt Neobanks?

Prediction of drop in cash usage in a "year or two" resembles other "evergreen" predictions like "mobile payments will become mainstream next year". Since I'm tired of hearing them year after year, I wish they come true. However, since cash usage has actually increased during the recent past, I doubt if my wish will be granted anytime soon.

Meanwhile, let me go back to The Death Of Cash Is At Least 190 Years Away and push out the predicted end date for cash by a decade or two.

Neither in this article nor in a related one earlier Making sense of the government’s banking API initiative do I see any reference to voice of customer regarding extent of their data that can be be shared outside their bank via this API. So I'm assuming that there's isn't any provision for customer opt-in at all. In that case, this is a privacy and data security nightmare. I'm happy that banks aren't selling their customers out by backing this initiative (at least not yet!). While fintech companies will stand to benefit from this API, question is, at whose cost? I also echo the comment of @FinexraMember below the aforementioned post: "Can the govrenment show us the stats that prove there is pent-up consumer demand for this?"

Curious to know how people pay for the remaining 4 out of 5 TfL journeys. Isn't OysterCard considered contactless?

@NischalaMurthyKaushik: Despite all the books written on the subject, to some extent, there's no guaranteed recipe for success for any type of business, let alone one that's patterned after the startup ecosystem. I totally agree that "for every successful startup which takes the podium there are a hundred who never see the light of the day".

@NischalaMurthyKaushik: Sorry but I think the key is to IGNORE these questions, at least in the short / medium term. Had the founders of some of these startups bothered to think through questions of revenue, profit, legal soundness and other business fundamentals, their companies wouldn't be around today, let alone win awards and confer the honor of their founders' wealth being ranked alongside traditional billionaires. Times have changed. New ways have emerged. While they may fly in the face of conventional business fundamentals, they've succeeded in building companies and wealth. Not all these ways might be sustainable for very long. But, as John Maynard Keynes once said, in the long term we're all dead anyway. PS: BTW, it's "Ketharaman"!

The advantage of working in a bank for only 3 years is that you can conveniently ignore the fact that banks enabled customers to use SMS to find balances and much more 5-10-15 years ago and, in a spirit of "ignorance is bliss", claim that your bank, based on messaging to find balances, is innovative, disruptive and blah blah blah.

@MickFennell: TY for your kind words. Actually jealousy is short-lived. The startup gets lost in the decimal point of its IT parent's revenues and profits. Losing voice in the bigger setup, its founders leave. Unless the parent company's leadership finds a compelling reason to measure the contribution of the startup differently from their own LOBs, I suspect that this situation will continue.

I recently read an article about young tycoons of India. The first thing that struck me at the time was how some people have made it to this list, with their wealth and stature compared with that of traditional billionaires, by building businesses that make virtually zero revenues, suffer huge losses and operate on the fringes of the law. Some of these startups have also been named as leading startups of the year in a leading startup contest earlier. Not sure what you call "business fundamentals" but I was always told that making revenues and profits in a legal manner was the most important business fundamental of them all. Maybe it's only me. 

On another note, there's this story about Albert Einstein that busted the myth of immutability of what constitutes basic even in hard sciences: When he was a professor at a Berlin college, Prof. Einstein distributed question papers for an exam. After noticing that virtually all questions were repeated from the previous year, many students asked if the absent-minded professor had distributed the previous year's question paper by mistake. Assuring them that he had not, Einstein quipped, "the questions are the same, but the answers are different this year".