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After years of doing SEO for companies in a wide array of industries, in my company we tend to believe that SEO is relevant only for companies selling fairly mainstream products and services. What most snake oil SEO agencies - and there are a lot of them - conveniently forget to mention is that search volumes are negligible in many product and service categories. If nobody is Googling for your products and services, SEO is a waste of time and money because it hardly matters whether your company appears on Top 3 or First Page or Wherever on Google SERP. Which is why many unscrupulous SEO agencies never commit, at the beginning of the engagement, to the keywords on which they will get you to rank high. At the end of the engagement, they will try to hoodwink you by making a big deal of getting you to rank high on your own company name. Be warned!

When I read that Apple was approving people with subprime credit scores for its Apple Card, I joked that Apple could always lock the borrower's iPhone if they defaulted on their credit card bill. I never thought Google would say it's no laughing matter.

Also Bank locks car when driver is late on loan repayment, as I highlighted in my blog post Will You, Won't You, Will You, Won't You Get Your Blockchain App?.

Looks like Blockchain is not required for these apps.

@PeterMinev:

TY for highlighting. TBH, I stopped reading at "The ambition for Global Money is to provide our customers with one global account". If HSBC's ambition itself is so limited, I thought there's no point reading further.

How does a product that only supports payments between two HSBC customers in two different countries become a competitor of TransferWise? Unless I'm missing something, I've used a similar product from Citi over 10 years ago. 

The definitions of various entities that I provided in my blog post https://www.finextra.com/blogposting/18307/why-banks-will-never-catch-up-with-fintechs may help reduce some of the confusion between Fintechs and Fincumbents.

Total BS posturing by Which? Will it next call for banks to reimburse victims of pick-pocketing?

Having been involved in the implementation of TARGET2 at a Top 5 UK Bank, I was shocked to read the headline. In the days of ransomware and all that, it's nice to know that cybercrime has been ruled out as the root cause. Back in the day, I'm guessing we wouldn't have been as relieved to note that the outage is perhaps just down to mundane things like the failure of a new release or patch! 

For readers in India and other countries where "Cashback" refers to a post-purchase discount that's paid directly into their payment instrument (say credit card), cashback in UK means something else: Consumers reach the checkout, pay with credit card or debit card for their purchase plus a relatively small amount like GBP 25 and get GBP 25 in cash from the attendant. This helps them avoid a separate trip to an ATM to withdraw small amounts of cash.

The way I understand the proposed new rule, customers can walk into a store and swipe / dip / tap their credit card or debit card and walk out with, say, GBP 25 without making any purchase in the store.

Well, a lot of people wondered why Google paid $1.5B for YouTube and Facebook, $1B for Instagram; and YT and IG are reportedly worth $150B and $100B respectively today! There's a reason why those guys make the big bucks:)  

From what I understood of the brilliant Stratechery article linked in my abovementioned tweet, Visa acquired Plaid to gain early mover advantage in Open Finance / Interbank Rails enabled by Plaid, which complements the Card Rails owned by Visa.

Re. "consumers whose data was unknowingly captured by Plaid" in the previous comment, that's not true. Consumers very well submitted their data knowingly. And it's not just Plaid. Nearly 10M bank account holders submitted similar data to PFM pioneer MINT 10 years ago. #GoFigure.  

Earlier this year, I asked if what Plaid did was phishing and wondered why banks didn't stop Plaid already. I now have the answers: (1) It is phishing (2) Had they nipped Plaid in the bud, banks wouldn't be able to claim damages, which they now are able to.