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Affirm sounds similar to BillMeLater, a startup founded in c.2005 and subsequently acquired by PayPal's owner eBay a few years later for ~US$ 1B.

Internet Banking has been around for over 10 years and Mobile Banking, for over 3 years. So the two technologies have collectively around for 6.5 years on an average. Rise in volume from 5.8B to 6.3B works out to 10.35% yoy growth. With total banking transaction volume likely to exceed 1T GBP, Internet + Mobile @ 6.3B GBP collectively account for < 1% of the total. Any consumer Internet technology that has these kind of numbers in its 7th year would be written off as massive failures. While I'm personally a fan of both technologies and have been using them since inception, numbers simply don't justify the exuberance.

I read somewhere that, while 70% of FORTUNE 500 companies have ERPs, over 90% of them submit their reports to their Boards in Excel. Spreadsheets are here to stay - I can bet that the investors are themselves very likely to use spreadsheets to evaluate the investee's proposal and to maintain the due diligence checklist. Tech vendors are increasingly realizing the futility of fighting Excel and positioning themselves as complementary to Excel - DOMO is an example I came across recently (https://twitter.com/GTM360/status/481444394747568128). 

At last Visa Europe admits to the reality that has stared at Visa Inc USA all along: VbV is painful; No leading online merchant has implemented it in USA (e.g. Amazon USA) despite FFIEC having mandated 2FA way back in c. 2005 - presumably because it causes more revenue loss due to shopping cart abandonment than fraud loss it prevents; I haven't heard a single report of fraud loss killing a single online merchant. If Visa Europe really goes ahead with plans for a "fantabulous stealth geo-located, fingerprinted, voice activated authentication" - to borrow from @MichaelD's comment - it will once again walk alone. I don't see any chance of Visa USA adopting such a "beast".

Apart from "... elderly people who generally prefer cash", there's the demographic segment of people like me who become elderly waiting for cashless to happen and, when it doesn't, must "prefer cash"? :)

What's worse, I'm not sure if there's any way for the MNO consortium to prevent a recurrence of such a problem in future. Some degree of schadenfreude is only to be expected but let's keep in mind such a branding nightmare could happen to anyone, anytime.

If the GBP 5 in the Oyster Card never expires, it's not such a bad thing - after all, the prepaid card business supposedly runs on a clear assumption of a certain level of breakage. While I'm no fan of a business refusing to accept the legal tender, is there anything stopping people from unchecking the default auto topup option? A simpler solution would be to stipulate upon TfL that auto topup should be made opt-in (as against opt-out as at present).

@AndyH: TY. I was now able to download the report. 

By acting as a master acquirer, PayPal enabled more online merchants to accept card payments. In this process, PayPal expanded the interchange base of banks to businesses that wouldn't have qualified for acquirer accounts directly from banks. To me, that sounds like PayPal acts as an agent of banks, not adversary. Even without PayPal, banks could only see the merchant ID and total spend, never the individual line items of spend. 

Great stuff. I just headed over to the Twitter feed and found my latest two comments at the top of the timeline (http://ow.ly/i/63bey). So, the "very near future" is already here!

Couple of suggestions for "the next release":

1. Use the commenter's Twitter Handle (@s_ketharaman) instead of their name in the comment tweet e.g. ".@s_ketharaman just said..." instead of "Ketharaman Swaminathan just said". (I'm sure you don't need me to explain the purpose of the dot at the start)
2. Use the author's Twitter Handle (if available) in the post tweet e.g. ".@PatPatel wrote The Middle Eastern..." instead of "The Middle Eastern...".