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Totally agree. Customers have as much right to have banks analyze their fintech transaction data as to have fintechs analyze their banking transaction data. Just that, if such two-side data sharing is mandated by law, fintechs might give up their demand to access banking data, as I'd pointed out in my blog post titled Innovative Fintechs Don’t Need No PSD2 Regulation.

@HiteshThakkar:

TY but I couldn't find any reference to the need or otherwise of Merchant Account in the TOI article linked in your comment. Merchant sign up is obviously required for BharatQR but that's not quite the same as Merchant Account. I know merchants who applied for "POS" on circa 10 Nov 2016 but still can't accept card payments because Acquirer Banks haven't issued Merchant Accounts to them. Apparently most micromerchants - PayTM's primary Target Group - don't meet banks' stringent risk management norms for issuance of Merchant Account.

Paper currency has its distribution challenges and costs. Internet makes geography history and all that. I don't get the logic of replacing / supplementing a paper currency that works globally with a cryptocurrency that works only in one canton!

Any idea if merchants need a hard-to-get Merchant Account to accept card payments via QR code? 

A few corrections: (1) As advertised in today's newspapers, it's called BharatQR, not IndiaQR (2) PayTM already has a QR code based payment service for instore payments (so does Visa viz. mVisa). It's already quite ubiquituous - I keep joking that someone should introduce a new "Graphic of the Year" award and name PayTM's QRC as the first winner of this award! The said investment announced yesterday is to expand the acceptance network of PayTM's existing QR service from the present figure of 5M merchants to 10M merchants.

Online P2P Lending was one of the very few realms of fintechs that seemed truly disruptive. Sad to see it going this way. On a side note, sadder to see "high rate of typos hit this Finextra article": "traditinal"; "ihas"; "unregualted"; "Chnese" :)

Now, here's a fintech I can easily agree with!

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http://fortune.com/2017/02/14/...

Yet while many financial advisors recommend skipping your morning latte and other inessential indulgences in order to save more for retirement, Acorns actually encourages you to keep swiping your credit card in pursuit of that same goal.

http://lnr.li/2RHMw
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As of now, my employer is not a Watson client. As a result, I'm forced to monitor the condition of my pair of sneakers myself once every few years and buy a new pair of sneakers whenever my existing pair shows visible signs of wear and tear. If only I worked for a Watson client, I'd be relieved from the mundane task of checking the physical condition of my sneakers once in a few years and spend my time on strategic activities like - um - dreaming up some inane use cases for partnership between my company's products and Watson.

@BernhardKainz:

TY for your comment. 

In the absence of PSD2, fintechs (e.g. Mint) have been enjoying full and unfettered access to users' bank accounts via online banking passwords. Despite doing so for nearly 10 years, they have only managed to come up with "mundane" and "of questionable value" functionality. So, PSD2 or lack of PSD2 has not been and won't be a constraint. Their lack of imagination has been the constraint.

https://twitter.com/annairrera/status/824652800466509832

Doesn't get more fintech than this: Robo-hedge fund to invest in P2P loans notarised w/blockchain

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In this day and age of AI, ML, Chatbots, etc., the very notion that an ad seen by bot is fake is so 20th century!

LOL. I thought this issue was forgotten after #CurrencySwitch. During the cash crunch caused by the recent demonetization in India, the longest queue I saw outside an ATM was at the bank whose ATM network was run by HDS and held responsible for the debit card data breach.