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"suspicious payments that occurred in the last few months". 

Notice the plurals: payments and months.

So, $272M was lost not in a single transaction but over multiple payments spread over several months. Essilor, to whom the account belongs, somehow does not notice the suspicious nature of these payments but magically expects the bank to have done so.

Nice try Essilor. I hope the court not only throws out its lawsuit but also fines it for sleeping at the watch and failure to perform its fiduciary duty towards its shareholders.

I'm a Founder. I'm also a member of one of those angel investing networks in India that you've mentioned. I separate my expertise from investments. Where I invest, I offer only money, and leave it to the founder to seek out and pay for my expertise if they're interested in it. This has worked very well for me so far. 

In most cases, founders really want just money but act as though they're also looking for expertise and investors really just want multibagger returns but act as though they're not in it for money alone. As a result, both parties engage in too much expertise gesturing and the sideshow dominates the engagement.   

If both sides cut to the chase and focus exclusively on what brought them together, much of this expertise gesturing will get nipped in the bud.

When I was in UK, all subscriptions debited directly to my bank account and credit card were listed on my online banking portal and I could cancel them easily from there - instead of having to navigate individual websites of different subscription providers.  

Since then, as I highlighted in What Is Subscription Trap?, it's not so easy to cancel subscriptions. But my post has examples only from India and USA. 

Keen to know whether it's still possible to cancel subscriptions in UK easily via online banking?

Fintechs claim that they use Technology to deliver lower cost (Free Broking, Neobanks), faster onboarding (Challenger Banks) and other nice things compared to traditional banks and FIs.

Warnings like this make me wonder if Technology is actually a smokescreen for some other less kosher ways of achieving the promised outcomes, like PFOF in the case of Free Broking, and Lax KYC in the case of Challenger Banks.

But, as we have seen repeatedly over the last two decades or so, by the time the regulator begins to suspect something fishy, these fintechs become too big to have to comply. I'm amazed at how this playbook has endured at least since the time of PayPal in the late 90s. Further reinforcement of my take at Fintechs Need Guts More Than Lawyers.

Unfortunately, the extra layer of security introduced by 3DS / 2FA also adds friction, increases the number of moving parts and accordingly raises the chances of failed payments, and reduces conversion / sales.

We've seen this in India when 2FA was introduced for online payments years ago. STRIPE warned about this in the context of SCA in EU / UK. Fearing the same problem, USA has not launched 3DS. Amazingly, almost all security solutions are developed by American companies but are not implemented in their own country. #GoFigure.

Nice post. On an off-the-beaten-track subject that has a very big role to play in determining success or failure of a software project, especially in a regulated industry like Banking & Financial Services. 

Let companies innovate and launch newer Method of Payments, as Fintechs and MNOs have done with A2A and Carrier Billing respectively.

Let different MOPs compete with one another. Let the ones with strong value proposition thrive and the ones with weak value proposition die. Let the consumer have more choice.  

That's the way of capitalism. I see no reason why we should we move from one single, ubiquitous retail payments option aka credit card in the past 70 years to another single, ubiquitous retail payments option in  the next 70 years.

In Open Banking Needs A Blockchain Boost, I proposed Open Banking Coin, a crypto token that could be used by banks and fintechs to incent customers to share their banking data via Open Banking. (Disclaimers in that post apply to this comment as well.)

One percentage point APR reduction on loan should also do the trick.

PS: Article says one percent APR reduction. IMO, that is too tiny to act as suitable incentive.

In an industry like mine, IT, where are dozens of competitors, it's virtually impossible to avoid meeting / bumping into employees of competitors at conferences, customer offices, social gatherings, etc. 

Maybe it's only me but I think this law is draconian and it's very difficult to stay on the right side of it in industries with multiple players.

My unsolicited $0.02: This law should be applied in its present form only to industries that have not more than 3 players.

OMG:(.

Fantastic article. 

Being in marketing, I attend countless conferences and industry gatherings. In the very first few paragraphs, I asked myself the question that you've raised later in the post "How do you know that the meeting or conference you are going to next week isn’t leading to an investigation by the Regulators?".

Since I thought this was a very off-the-beaten-track post by the standards of the typical blog post on Finextra, I had another question, which also you've raised later: "And so, why share this tale of woe with a wider audience?"

Thank you for the warning!