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Well, the last time Coop stopped asking "Why" and moved forward with legacy transformation, it almost went bust: "...calamitous IT re-platforming project that contributed to a £300 million write-off and left the bank on the brink of collapse." 

https://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=26019

Unfortunately, Coop is damned if it transforms legacy and damned if it doesn't transform legacy. Its plight is more reflective of the way in which attempted to get out of legacy earlier and the way in which it is now attempting to stay with legacy, rather than legacy itself.

On a side note, I just came across a McKinsey article which prescribes two different ways of doing legacy transformation. Maybe the "two-speed" approach will suit most banks in developed nations and the "greenfield" approach will work better in emerging markets.

http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/Business_Technology/Two_ways_to_modernize_IT_systems_for_the_digital_era

@VishwanathT: Good question:) One that I've asked many times, including in 6 Reasons Why Banks Can't Transform Legacy Applications.

@JamesP: I can hardly think of a single bank on a mainframe core banking system in India but, in my personal experience, their uptimes are not any higher than those of any bank systems I've experienced in UK. Banking system failures of the nature visible to the outside world can be caused by switches, network, bandwidth, and many other moving parts. While legacy presents its own problems, I'm not sure if it can be singularly held responsible for all failures. 

From personal experience with 2 of the 11 companies granted payments bank license, Vodafone MPESA and PAYTM, both "take deposits, convey remittances & dispense payments" as Economic Times summarized the remit of payments banks. Not sure what else the new payments bank license would empower them to do apart from raising the deposit amount to INR 1L. Both of them having been trying to replace plastic with mobile form factor - albeit on the existing card rails - so I doubt if they'd rush to launch debit and credit cards now.

@Varadarajan CA: Not sure if it's public knowledge but I know from my alma mater circles that RBI's payments committee does include a professor from the maths department of IIT Bombay.

I've been reading about internal fraud and similar measures to detect it for nearly two decades. Part of that time, I've also sold Intrusion Detection Systems and Network Access Control software. Unfortunately, nothing much seems to have changed. Fraud detection is one of those things that present a classical Catch-22 situation: "If you report it, then it is detected, so detection measures are already in place. If it is not detected, it has probably not occurred, so detection measures are not required." On top of that, there is too much scare mongering going around, so many companies have learned to tune out the topic. For example, who will believe that a 31K GBP fraud can bring down a Banco Santander? IMO, the really severe problem is rogue trading of the nature that brought down ING Barings. I recall hearing only one other case like that of a NJ-based trading firm, so I tend to believe that that problem has been nailed.

SQUARE just announced that it'd take over the fraud liability of US merchants who don't move to EMV by the October 1 deadline.

https://squareup.com/news/why-square-sellers-can-rest-easy-about-the-liability-shift

While parties in ROW question why it's hard to remember a PIN, SQUARE actually tells businesses that "It’s all a bit complicated — and scary-sounding" and assures them that it would take over the fraud liability, so "...there’s no cause for alarm."

With a partner like SQUARE, why would a US merchant rush to adopt the more friction-prone EMV technology? Goes to show how local business culture influences mainstream adoption of some technologies like these.

@SeevaS: TY for your kind words.

@CharmaineO: TY for your kind words. I've heard flagbearers of Data Mining claim that their technology actually uncovers related (measurable) variables automatically! More in Difference Between Data Mining And Predictive Analytics.

TY @ChrisD for the clarifications and the figures. I received my June 2008, if not even May 2008, salary via FPS. I remember my company's CFO telling me that the company switched from BACS to FPS to save on float. Now that you clarify that there's no float in BACS, I guess the switch was triggered by some other reason. I assumed that the same reason would drive every company to do the same. Now, if the mainstream market still uses BACS for payroll, as your comment about small employers seems to imply, I guess I'm guilty of the same mistake made by most fintech professionals who assume that their personal preferences and experiences would automatically spread like wild fire to the overall market!

@JamesP: You're right, FPS didn't provide DD then. Thanks to @ChrisD, we have it from the horse's mouth that it still doesn't. But, you know how it is with disruptions - people expected FPS to do everything except make coffee! On a more serious note, because money left the payor's account on T-3 in the case of BACS and T-0 in the case of FPS, the expectation was that payors would convert their BACS DD mandates to FPS DC - I forget what the standing instruction equivalent was called in FPS - so that they could hold on to their money for a couple more days. Looks like that hasn't happened.

Nice post. I've been excited about Retail Currency Management ever since I read a report by an analyst - TowerGroup? - about this technology back in 2009. Six years later, am curious to know how many success stories there are of this technology among retail chains.

The growth since PayM's first anniversary - volumes of GBP 70M now versus 44M then - is impressive. However, in absolute terms, this is a drop in the retail payments ocean and reinforces my earlier observation that P2P is a very low volume type of retail payments. 

Paym celebrates first anniversary