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Looks like branch and digital channels are not the only two old-new things that will coexist with each other. South Korea is widely acclaimed to be years ahead of the ROW in mobile payments. But it still has the highest ATM density in the world! (Source).

"business typhoons"? Can we expect follow-on posts about business cyclones, hurricanes, storms, tsunamis, etc.? LOL:)

@AlexanderPeschkoff:

I'm no Apple user but, going by what I've heard from my customers involved in mobile app development, Apple has veto power over every feature in every iOS app meant for installation on an iPhone. I'm told the veto extends even to enterprise iOS apps used only within a company's "walled garden". The Internet has not destroyed rent seekers - it has just shifted rent seeking from (say) taxi unions to the Apples of the world.

Whoa great initiative. Hope other banks follow suit. Friction has been my pet peeve with banks. They can definitely use some UX and CX inputs to deliver a more frictionless customer journey.

@AlexanderPeschkoff + 1. LOL:)

At the risk of sparking off another heated debate, Finextra reported yesterday that tech specs for PSD2 may get postponed to 2019. When I read that, I wondered how many fintechs would be around till then for PSD2 to really matter much!

@AlexanderPeschkoff: JFYI, my comment about Dwolla et al was in response to @ChrisBrown's comment, not your comment about PSD2. 

Oh, no, not true at all. Dwolla, Carrier Billing and SoftCard all began by setting up independent payment rails separate from ACH / card rails. As I highlighted in https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=7438, carrier billing players began life on MNO rails and levied 30-40% transaction fees on merchants. With that kind of fees compared to 1-3% MDR of card networks, it was not surprising that they failed to gain traction. Only then did they hitch themselves to card rails as a last ditch effort to survive, realizing that they could never match card networks's 1-3% MDR.

Progress comes from solving problems, not inventing new things just for the sake of it and without understanding the dynamics of the incumbent situation. In any case, so many companies across so many industries have claimed that card payments are costly but have uniformly failed in their attempts to come up with a cheaper alternative for the mainstream market e.g. Dwolla, Carrier Billing, MCX / CurrentC, SoftCard / ISIS, etc. Given this backdrop, I tend to believe that card-replacement products are more a sign of delusion, not innovation / progress.

Like other companies, Visa is measured on Return on Equity, which is based on equity. At $30.783B, Visa's equity is only 15% of its quarter-trillion market cap. AFAIK, there's no metric called Return on Market Cap against which Visa is expected to deliver returns.

Not sure about Alipay but the Alipay-backed mobile wallet PayTM in India doesn't charge merchant fees for accepting cashless payments. This is in sharp contrast to 0.5-2% MDR levied by other digital payment alternatives like debit card, credit card and UPI. While PayTM has arguably the best UX of all the digital payment products in India, its zero-fees business model is arguably a bigger driver of its success. 

Thought of bringing this up because it's often forgotten that business model plays as important a role as product / technology in many of these "Product Category X replaces Product Category Y" memes. 

No. "Change" is any degree of change. "Complete replacement" means replacement of at least 90%, if not 100% (which becomes "disruption"). I'll leave the definition of "major change" open-ended and context-sensitive!