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Nice post but some of its conclusions might be a bit different had it taken into account a few recent updates. From 1 March 2018, all mobile wallets in India require full KYC, which includes Aadhaar Number linkage. My bank wallet PayZapp seems to be automatically KYC-compliant - I did nothing but got an SMS to confirm that KYC is done. However my fintech PayTM wallet is not. Contrary to what finsurgents say, it's the banks that permit branchless Aadhaar linkage - PayTM insists on visits to physical stores, which often have defective fingerprint readers. According to doomsday predictions, fintech mobile wallets in India are staring at a 80% drop in volumes as a result of this new mandate. It also doesn't help that PayTM has started suffering erosion of trust, as I highlighted in my latest post PayTM Shows How Fintechs Can Lose Trust.

Totally agree with @MelvinHaskins. Financial advisors keep saying "you can't time the markets". But history has shown that timing probably matters more than anything else in determining rate of returns of various financial investment products.

In my blog post Stocks Always Underperform Fixed Deposits (hyperlink removed to comply with Finextra Community Rules but this post should appear on top of Google Search results when searched by its title), I referenced an article that studied trends from March 1992 to March 2012 and concluded that fixed deposits outperformed stocks. As I pointed out that in my post, if the study had started just one year later, the article would've reached exactly the opposite conclusion.

@RodneyFarmer:

Is there a typo in your last line? Did you actually mean 10 months? Having worked for a CBS company, I've been hearing predictions of the death of CBS for 10-15 years, still CBS is around. For something like CBS to go away needs a disruptive shock to come along. If such a shock happens, in today's fast moving world, CBS will get uprooted in a few months. If such a shock does not happen, CBS will only get more entrenched than it is today and won't go away even after 20 years. Millennials, Microservices, and many other drivers mentioned by you are all flavors of the current season. They themselves will get replaced by some other flavors of the season in the next 3-5 years. No way they'll impact CBS after 10-20 years.

Oh Affirmative Action is still very much alive in USA. It may be optional but it's not illegal.

@MelvinHaskins: Isn't that the goal of Affirmative Action? And isn't Affirmative Action legal??

Good post. I like the expression "Transaction Laundering". The other day, I read an article on KrebsOnSecurity that suspects Money Laundering Via Author Impersonation on Amazon?

On a side note, AirBnB was founded by exploiting "regulatory gaps", as I'd highlighted in Fintechs Need Marketers And Lobbyists, Not Lawyers. It's not surprising that somebody else would use it to outright break the law!

On second thoughts, I needn't worry too much - Fincumbents will kill fintechs' aspirations of collaboration.

(For the uninitiated, “Fincumbents” refers to B2B technology companies that have been supplying IT products and services to financial institutions for ages; “Fintechs” are direct-to-consumer financial technology startups that began life with the mission to kill traditional banks.)

I hope banks go easy with this fintech partnership bit. Just because that's perhaps the only way for fintechs to survive doesn't mean banks should get into it blindly. From recent personal experience with a leading fintech, incumbents are perfectly right in perceiving that fintech partnerships will have "negative impacts on customer trust".

tl;dr. 

Total BS. In my three decades of observing technology adoption at BFSI, I've heard people make the same statement w.r.t. Unix minicomputers, OOPS, CORBA, SOA, Web, Web 2.0, RIA, Mobile, Social Media, etc. During this period, banks have not only continued with their mainframe CBS but have launched innovative products, introduced cutting edge technologies, outperformed wannabe TELCO and fintech disruptors and, above all, remained the most profitable sector in Fortune 500.

IMO, people with vested interest in replacing mainframes should do a better job of shilling their alternative offerings. 

@BobLyddon: LOL:) I've noticed that. At the height of cash crunch caused by de/remonetization in India in Nov-Dec 2016, the retail payments industry regulator cum bank consortium NPCI launched BHIM, a mobile payment app that supports A2A fund transfer without entering cumbersome account, sort code details. Functionally the equivalent of EU's PayM / Zapp, which took several months / years to launch, BHIM happened in 45 days.