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I just stumbled on to EtherIsc. It offers Ethereum-based flight delay compensation on many more sectors than AXA Fizzy. You don't even need to have a ticket on that flight to apply for a delay policy! But EtherIsc works only on alt-coin payments.

@ShajuNair:

So what if it's all hype / buzzword? Many innovations are fueled by hype and sustained by buzzwords until they can stand on their legs. If you'd ignored this article and invested $100 in BTC when it was published, you'd be sitting on top of $500 today. Is that such a bad thing?

Not sure how much research you've done before making a sweeping statement about people lacking technical knowledge or domain expertise about Blockchain. Should you look around, you'll find some stunning examples of dApps out there e.g. AXA Fizzy Flight Delay Insurance. This article (https://medium.com/yope-chain/30-things-you-can-do-with-a-blockchain-b23b2ab39664) provides a list of 30 innovative and potentially-disruptive Blockchain dApps. While the jury's out on why these apps had to wait for Blockchain, fact is many of them didn't happen on traditional centralized artchitectures.

iPhone has doubled its version to X.

Plastic hasn't died. 

On the contrary, pure play mobile wallets like PayTM are launching plastic cards these days!

Now even Venmo, the Darling of Millennials and Onetime Expected Killer of Plastic, has launched a plastic card!

Brilliant product! Delay, flight cancellation, lost baggage - the aviation industry is full of "parameters" on which damages can be claimed. Kudos to Fizzy AXA for choosing what's perhaps the most appropriate industry for launching "parametric insurance"!

On a side note, can anyone throw some light on the dependency of such an insurance product on Blockchain. Is there any intrinsic shortcoming with a centralized database architecture that compels one to launch this product only on the distributed database architecture facilitated by Blockchain?

"The thieves managed to access card account numbers, expiration dates, and cardholder names - enough information for online purchases."

How? Without CVV, how can the hacker make online purchases? And I'm talking about 1FA regimes like USA where VbV / MSC / Mobile OTP are not required for online card usage.

As Ron Shevlin points out in his Financial Brand article titled In Are Branches Dying? Or Not?, while number of branches of US banks has declined steadily over time, the number of branches per US bank has actually increased over time. Any idea what that metric looks like for European banks?

For some reason, I saw a link to this article on my Twitter Timeline today. I clicked thru' and discovered that it's dated 20 Jan 2016. I don't remember the article although I see my comment on it. A BTC was worth ~USD 800 when this article was published (Source: BI) versus USD 4110 USD today.

Enough proof that hype works.

Aadhaar UID in India definitely has helped many people in India get the ID required to qualify for a bank account. However, whether they actually get a bank account or not depends upon whether the bank wants to give them a bank account. Until the government mandated the no-frills PMJDY bank account, very few of these newly-ID'd people got a bank account. While they've now got a PMJDY bank account, for reasons I highlighted in Calling B.S On Banking The Unbanked, moneylenders and blade companies are still their first port of call of such - and many more people - when they need a loan or wish to make a fixed deposit. And, quite frankly, I haven't seen much empirical evidence showing that banking the unbanked alone has led to upward mobility.

"editorail"? I've heard of MonoRail, EuRail, etc. but what's EditoRail?

Spell check may be equally useful for Finextra Commenters:)