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@Bob Lyddon:

Yes, I noticed that. But, having seen the program delay announcement playbook at work several times - and having helped write it on occasion, I must confess - that's not surprising. Even 3-4 months ago, SWIFT maintained that start date would be 2021. It's only as the date has approached that the postponement to 2022 has been announced. End date of 2025 is too far away. If we wait until 2024, we'll hear about the postponement of the end date.

My "Waiting for Godot" feeling about ISO 20022 just got stronger.

Swift delays ISO 20022 cross-border payments migration

Sorry but, for reasons I highlighted in Secret Of Survival Of Bank Branches, "eliminate go to the bank" is tantamount to elimination of new product sales. Since no bank would like that, Branch And Digital Channels Will Coexist Forever.

There are indeed compelling reasons to have multiple bank accounts. I too had two when I was in UK, currently have three in India, and so on. The accent is on "juggle". When people are willing to go thru' the major hassles of having multiple bank accounts (due to compelling reasons), the hassles of juggling them with multiple apps are comparatively small. If at all they seek a solution for that hassle, I suspect it would be via a third party app like UPI (India) or Zelle (USA) - not an app from one of the involved banks. This is somewhat similar to what happened in the PFM space: I know banks who tried account aggregation across multiple bank accounts. But such apps haven't gained traction compared to a third party PFM app like Mint.  

Day to day life is busy enough without having to juggle multiple bank accounts! Only time will tell but, as of now, this feature seems like a solution searching for a problem. 

"People with middle initials are more credit worthy".

This is an insight uncovered by banks via Big Data analytics. As a result, if there's a toss up between making a loan to one person with middle initial and another person without middle initial, all other things being equal, a bank will make the loan to the former. To me, this is a best practice.

That said, since the decision is prejudiced against people without middle initial and is unfair to that cohort, it also qualifies as a bias according to the dictionary meaning of the term.  

Curious to know if there's an objective way to distinguish between Best Practice and Bias. Unless there is, we can keep talking about avoiding bias without really making any progress. End of the day, a whole lot of work in AI / ML is around analysis of data to uncover such insights.  

Re. the headline, PhonePe is just one of the dozens of digital payment services in India. All debit cards and credit cards, which are also counted as digital payments, worked fine (except those issued by YES Bank). Anyway the point is now moot because even PhonePe is back up for over 24 hours by now. 

This could work! I gave many examples of switching opportunities surfaced by PFM apps in A Killer Feature For PFM On The Eve Of PSD2. In all cases, the "transfer proved to be far more cumbersome than I'd anticipated". I'd envisaged automatic switching of providers / plans as a killer feature for PFM.

If Youtility really works as advertised and actually enables switching of utility providers in the promised two minutes, it has a good thing going and I'm very bullish about the startup's outlook.

Like most new-age tech-driven startups, fintechs are VC funded. The way the VC Investment Model works, in the initial rounds of funding, it rewards growth over profits (or even revenues) with skyhigh valuations. Unburdened by revenue and profit considerations, the fintech can afford to overcommit and overdeliver, thus finding it easy to foster trust during this phase. 

However, the rubber hits the road during later stages of funding when revenues - even profits - become critical. It becomes difficult for the fintech to continue doing what it was doing earlier. In other words, later funding stages put a tremendous strain on trust maintenance.  

I illustrated this challenge in my blog post PayTM Shows How Fintechs Can Lose Trust with the specific example of India's largest fintech.

According to the common narrative, fintechs who fail to to surmount this challenge will die. But, going by the robust growth in customer count and valuation of PayTM in the subsequent two years after I published the aforementioned post, I'm not so sure.

PayPal is another example that comes to mind. During its +20 years of existence, the fintech has surely not enjoyed growing trust from the merchant community, what with the rising number of merchant accounts it keeps freezing arbitrarily.   

Sometimes I wonder if trust is overrated, at least in the context of fintechs.

LOL maybe the penalty for data breach is lower than that for incompetence!!!