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Trust a challenger bank to challenge everything done by traditional banks - including connecting frictionlessly to Yolt:).

On a side note, Yolt / Starling has mastered the art of enhancing customer engagement via error messages. I spent a minute wondering what "Caught Short" could mean - which is a full 60 seconds more than what I'd have done had the app thrown out a prosaic error message like "Unable to connect. Please try later".

@MarkSantall:

TY for the clarification. While on the subject of increased adoption, I've shared my thoughts here.

Not so soon @FinextraMember. Handing over online banking creds to a third party has violated the TOS of every bank in the world I know and still the likes of MINT have gotten millions of people to do it for over a decade and made merry as a result. How many banks / regulators have declared MINT illegal during this period?

@JamesPiggot:

"...they assume anything done on a computer is pretty much instant." So it's not only my father or mother or sister or wife or daughter, none of whom is remotely connected with fintech or payments tech! It's even more difficult to explain why payments done via computers could fail!! 

"Handling cheques has become a real problem because of branch closure. If there is no branch nearby depositing a cheque can be a real chore, so cheque imaging is very welcome!". Extremely valid point. The banker in Why Branch And Digital Channels Will Coexist Forever told me that, despite 90% of routing transactions going digital, their branch network is growing mainly because of cheques. (For many years, cheque truncation at the backend is fairly ubiquitous in India but there are still no signs of Mobile RDC - probably because of a conservative regulator and / or shift of the entire spotlight to digital payments.)

@JohnBertrand:

Actually, many startups have become successful by deftly sidestepping regulation, as I'd highlighted in my blog posts Fintechs Need Marketers And Lobbyists – Not Lawyers and Fintechs Need Guts More Than Lawyers!. I'm sure MINT will one of the fintechs that shows that Innovative Fintechs Don’t Need No PSD2 Regulation. I predict it will claim that it has the mother of all consents because it has the online banking credentials of its millions of customers. Ergo, IMO, value proposition is more key than consent or anything else. But only time will tell.

For the moment, assuming that consent is key, let me move on to another topic, namely, the ownership and language of the consent.

As we've seen in the case of Overdraft Protection (see my blog post Overdraft Protection - Another Hot Opportunity For BPOs?), I tend to believe that the exact language is what will eventually differentiate a granular consent from a carte blanche.

I can think of at least three alternative languages: 

(A) I consent to PFM accessing all data in tables CUST_TRXN, CUST_MORTGAGE, but not in tables CUST_LOAN_TRXN and CUST_CREDITCARD_TRXN

(B) I consent to PFM accessing all data related to current account and mortgages but not loans and credit cards

(C) I consent to PFM accessing all data it requires to give me tips to maximize my yield but not to switch banks.

As you can see, the language shifts from technical to feature to benefit.

Any idea whether PSD2/Open Banking regulation has (1) defined who is responsible for obtaining the consent (between the Bank that holds the data and the PFM that seeks access to the data) and (2) frozen the content language (between technical or feature or benefit)?

@AnirudhRaghavendra:

According to this MINT article about digital payment transaction values in India, batch mode NEFT is the clear winner.

Batch A2A NEFT: 12,50,000 Crores INR

Realtime A2A IMPS: 65,100 Crores INR

Batch:Realtime = 1250000/65100 = 19.2:1 ~ 20X

Like in UK, batch payment volumes far exceed realtime payment volumes even in India.

This resonates strongly with my aforementioned belief that realtime payments is a hygiene factor.

I get what's the whole point of a great consent model but my question is, how relevant is it to MINT - when it has already got what would seem the mother of all consent from those millions of customers who have willingly handed over their online banking creds to MINT.

PFMs like MINT have had the online banking credentials of millions of people. Since they've been having this info for nearly a decade without any charges of hacking, I presume they have the requisite consent from those people to access their banking information.

Do they need to get any more consent from those people in the context of Open Banking?

I've long held that Mobile RDC is the #1 killer app of mobile banking. It now appears that cardless ATM is becoming another killer app. I don't belong to the "cash / cheque is dying" brigade. But, even to me, it seems odd that cash and cheque processing apps are proving so popular. 

Whither mobile wallets and other forms of digital payments that were supposed to kill cash and cheques?

Earlier today, I came across a very interesting article on why neobanks have been largely a flop show. It makes a similar point about mobile-only/first. 

http://edgardunn.com/2017/11/new-banking-being-digital-being-different/