Community

While PSP Venmo is reputed to be the first customer of Plaid in USA 4-5 years ago, it's a P2P payment service and does not help Merchants. I reckon that Plaid gets a lot more traction in USA from non-payments use cases in in wealth management, stock trading, money management, etc. Going by that track record, Merchants in Europe may be in for disappointment if they expect Plaid to move the needle too much on non-card rail payments via Open Banking. Besides, well before Open Banking and Plaid have arrived on the scene, there have been many A2A payments services in Europe (e.g. myBank, PayM) - just that they failed to go mainstream and threaten card networks too much. For the same reason, I doubt if Open Banking / Plaid based A2A payments will fare any better in Europe. 

"fintech disrupter being purchased by the incumbent" is not a contradiction at all.

On the contrary, it's straight out of the FI Innovation Playbook, as I highlighted in Fintech Shouldn’t Stop Chanting The Disruption Mantra.

Sure, all digital payment apps do require Internet connectivity. When I last checked, India had close to 700 million Internet users. That works out to ~3 Internet users per household, so that's not a limiting factor.

Other prerequisites for digital payment app usage are Smartphone and Funding Source, which are also not limiting factors, with 450M smartphones and 900 million debit cards in India. 

While on the subject, contrary to popular misconception, digital payment apps have no role to play in driving Financial Inclusion in India. That's because people must have a bank account to even onboard a digital payment app, let alone use it. Financial Inclusion has been driven by government programs like PMJDY etc., not technology. It has worked because 70% of banking industry in India is government-owned. 

In my 2009 article on multilingual support in TEC, I highlighted the additional complications posed in Sanctions Screening by umlaut and other accent characters used in European languages e.g. when "Müller" is wrongly replaced by "Muller" rather than "Mueller".

Keen to know if those challenges have been resolved in the 11 years since that article was published.  

To a certain extent, GDPR has gummed up the works, not only in Sanctions Screening but in Marketing, Advertising and other areas, so I'd cut FIs some slack.

On a side note, suppose a payment is directed to Company B. Obviously, B should undergo sanctions screening. Now, if B is 100% owned by Company A, does it mean that A is "beneficial above 25%" and A also must be subject to sanctions screening?

Per Medianama article referencing the same PRICE study, the percentage is 80%!

https://www.medianama.com/2021/01/223-npci-survey-digital-payments-increase/ .

I have heard of Shevlin Law where two different studies come up with two drastically different results. But this takes the law to the next level where same study comes up with drastically different numbers:) 

By warning everyone that they will go bankrupt if they drink any more $5 coffee, PFMs and MoMMAs create tremendous anxiety and drive people to that $16 avocado toast. Yes, propensity for overspending totally makes sense.

@DmitryDolgorukov: TY for your detailed response. I write regularly on SAAS on my company blog. I write only about finserv tech on Finextra. If I think of a topic at the intersection of Finserv and SAAS, I'll post it on Finextra. 

By "Out of the Box", I think you mean "Commercial Off The Shelf" (COTS), which typically refers to onpremise software. 

"configurable software" normally refers to the activity of configuring a COTS software. What you probably mean is "Component Based Solution Assembly" software or "assemblable software".

With that bit of housekeeping out of the way, I'm curious to know why your post makes no mention of SAAS, which has arguably been the hottest category of software in the last 5-10 years. It promises to eliminate one of the major cons of COTS, namely, hassles and cost of maintenance, updates, etc.

When I wrote Coin Solves A Pain. But Is It A 100 Dollar Pain? in 2014, I found the idea of replacing all credit / debit / loyalty cards with one plastic card very compelling. The value proposition vis-a-vis loyalty cards is somewhat diminished now in markets where Merchants have replaced dedicated loyalty cards and loyalty membership numbers with Mobile Number, so there's no need to carry the physical loyalty card any more. 

Hope Curve has better luck than Coin.