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What remittance monopoly? Banks do remittance. Fintechs do remittance. Some of those fintechs were supposed to disrupt Western Union, MoneyGram, etc. What happened to all that talk? With hefty fees and unfavorable forex rates from incumbents, remittance was supposed to be ripe for disruption by VC-funded fintechs. Where did they bungle?

Nice and thought-provoking post.

But, since times immemorial, banks have been going to courts to recover outstanding loans. The only new thing is, they're increasingly using a digital loan application process. But even there, banks generally seek wet-ink signature on the loan agreement at the last step before disbursing the money. I'm sure that's the copy of loan agreement they'll submit to courts. In front of the court, the borrower can't really claim that the process was any more unfair compared to a wholly paper-based process.

IMO, the real challenge will be faced by nonbank fintechs, who claim to be approving loans and disbursing funds without any physical step / documentation. Even in the case of some of them, their claim is only a go-to-market message to differentiate themselves from traditional FIs and I strongly suspect that they also have a physical step at the end. As I highlighted in Flight Delay Insurance - Why Blockchain?, the Blockchain-based flight delay insurance provider actually registers the insurance agreement with Malta Government and pays stamp duty.

@Sundara Balaji:

The answer to most of your questions is "Only the paranoid survive". Popularized by Intel's iconic CEO Andy Grove, who wrote an eponymous book, the maxim has become the standard business philosophy of a number of American companies including Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, MasterCard, et al. 

@Sundara Balaji:

TY for your reply. Marketplace means Person-to-Business payments. When they launched card payments, V/MC surely had 100% of cashless payment volumes. 50-60 years later, that figure is 90%. What erosion of marketshare are you talking about?

AFAIK, an overwhelming share of non-cash and non-card payments made by new generation consumers is Person-to-Person and does not affect V/MC, whose card payments are for Person-to-Business. As the CEO of MC keeps pointing out, his competitor is cash, not other cashless payment methods.

According to https://www.multichain.com/blog/2016/03/blockchains-vs-centralized-databases/, Blockchain code cannot initiate interactions with the outside world. Wonder how a Blockchain dApp can offer an API to external platforms.

Since you mention Marketplace - aka Platformification -: 

While Visa is seen as a card network, it could be argued that Visa is also a marketplace. At the highest level is Visa, the marketplace operator. At the next level are Acquirer Banks and Issuer Banks who act as Visa's Agents to onboard Merchants and Consumers respectively. At the last level are Merchants who sell goods / services and Consumers who buy goods / services. Ditto for MasterCard and other leading card networks.

Would you agree?

Maybe it's only me but I thought FPS rails is owned by UK banks. While direct access to FPS will allow TransferWise to cut out one bank middleman, wouldn't the access fees it pays enrich the coffers of traditional banks anyway?

Agreed but, if the founding premise of Open Banking is valid, your mum and next door neighbor and the Average Joe / Jane Consumer should've been facing the pain and having the need and researching the solution for a long, long time in the past. Just that, their search would've yielded no results all these years. After the recent launch of Open Banking, their search should yield results and people should be queuing up to adopt Open Banking solutions. In other words, like a cure for cancer, there should be a long waiting list for adopters of Open Banking.

@Claire Callan:

From what I understand, the need for Open Banking was felt on the basis of the following understanding of the market: (1) There's a lot of value in customer's banking data (2) Banks are doing nothing with that data (3) Customers are deprived of all the insights they can gain from their data (4) Ergo customer's banking data should be thrown open to third-parties to mine and generate insights that are useful to customers. 

By doing #4, Open Banking should be fulfilling a long pent-up consumer demand. Ergo Consumers *should* be rushing out the door looking for Open Banking products and services. Curious to know why you believe otherwise.

Oh LOL. In marketing, it's quite common to come across big differences between what consumers say they'd do (e.g. switch account to a neobank) and what consumers actually do (e.g. stay with their traditional bank). I didn't think I'd see that disconnect on Finextra e.g. claim a story to be boring versus bestow that story with the most pageviews!