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Of course, UBER will do the right thing, just that it will be right by itself, its shareholders and its promoters. It's well known that Uber has leveraged regulatory gaps wherever possible. HBR goes a step further and alleges the company with "mounting scandals" and exhorts regulators to shut it down. Uber is optimistic that it will continue to get away with its footloose, fancyfree approach towards regs. So far it has succeeded, and its approach to London ban is yet another exhibit. 

Against that backdrop, good luck with your optimism.

Banning Uber reminds me of an old saying about smoking: "It's easy to quit smoking. I've done it so many times".

I first heard that Uber was banned in London a year or two. Then I heard Uber would continue to operate in London until some appeal. Everything went quiet until 3 months ago when we once again heard that Uber is banned in London. I just fired up my Uber app. I'm still able to see rides from my home to office in London.

Uber can get banned but it's another thing for Uber to go off the roads! Uber seems to be a law unto itself. I seriously doubt if the company will be too bothered about mundane matters like legalities of driver onboarding even for itself, let alone lead by example for the rideshare industry.

Nice post but keen to know how TransferWise manages to send money cross-border only basis beneficiary account number. Doesn't it require at least the name of the bene's bank, if not also branch?

I'm looking forward to the day I can send money cross-border only basis bene's name and National ID # (such as SSN in USA, NI# in UK, Aadhaar # in India). 

@Chetan Ghadge + 1. 

That's exactly what I'd written at the end of my post entitled Innovative Fintechs Don’t Need No PSD2 Regulation:

"Fintechs who're still not convinced that they should shed their reliance on 'open banking' should just pause to contemplate their future if said regulation becomes two-sided and requires fintechs to share their customer info with banks."

Sadly, things are going in the opposite direction in other industries.

As soon as PayPal bought honey for $4B, Amazon suddenly started flashing a warning on its checkout screen, highlighting the security risks of using the popular Coupon Browser Extension and urging customers to remove it.

LinkedIn recently blocked hiQ from accessing profile info despite the fact that 100% of the said info is entered by and belongs to Users.

Apple of course spins its policy as "protecting consumer privacy" but less said the better about its chances of sharing fitness data with third parties. 

One in four Americans with an online bank account has given away their online banking username and password to one or more fintechs via Plaid. The process is absolutely frictionless. They entering their (say) Chase creds into a screen without even realizing that the screen does not belong to Chase website or app. Since all this happens without Open Banking, what's the whole point of Open Banking? 

Notwithstanding that, I'm sure banks will be more than happy to cede control of data to customers if regulators will hold customers - not banks - responsible for all frauds, thefts and losses arising out of breaches and unauthorized uses of that data.

Saw this tweet on how Visa has announced an increase in CNP interchange rates. It's US-centric but I was surprised to find some tweeples saying that even PayPal and SQUARE have failed to make a dent on Visa / MasterCard when it comes to online / CNP payments.

Great feature, no doubt, but I'm curious how it works. If the expense is made with credit card, how can it be traced back to a Tide transaction? Multiple receipts for multiple payments made with the same credit card can be traced back to the credit card payment entry on Tide but how will a single receipt be traceable?

"payments system set up within days rather than weeks or months". Merchants still choose BarclayCard over PayPal? 

LOL it's easier to just hand over username and password of online banking accounts to the Mints and the Plaids of the world instead of waiting for Open Banking apps to see the light of the day!

PFM and Bank Account-linked A2A Payments have been around for over a decade since the days of Mint, myBank et al. They used screen scraping and took over online banking creds of users. Neither consumers nor banks gave a damn about the security risk involved in the process. Apparently, one in four Americans has shared their banking creds with some fintech or the other via Plaid.

When the two primary actors are so blase about security, the API-based "secure access" premised by Open Banking risks becoming a damp squib. To hope to achieve any degree of adoption, new age Open Banking fintech apps need to be 10X better than the incumbent PFM and A2A apps that have been working quite well without Open Banking. And that's not so easy, especially in PFM, where there's no great evidence that the mainstream market is even so keen on the product category itself.

Maybe the "Open Banking Coin" I postulated in Open Banking Needs A Blockchain Boost is the one way to achieve the required 10X multiplier.