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I have read elsewhere that around 50% of wire transfers are made by human trafficking mafia, illicit arms dealers and drug lords. It's high time regulators took heed of this, shut down wire transfers and slashed the size of these nefarious businesses to the maximum amount of currency notes they can carry in suitcases.

A friend of mine was telling me, to travel by public transport from downtown Toronto to a suburb hardly 20 kms away, he has to change 3 different transport companies and buy 3 different tickets. If a onetime affair like transport can't be handled by just 3 different companies in a single city working together, we can imagine the difficulties of so many different insurers and banks working together across so many different countries to make global insurance and global bank accounts a reality. Much as these concepts are great for consumers, I doubt if they'll ever become real anytime soon. Meanwhile, my Citi UK account doesn't automatically get me an account in Citi India - that's the reality and I doubt if it's going to change anytime soon.

@AnthonyWalton:

TY for the clarification. I mostly agree with you but, in the world of innovation driven by mantras like "iterative approach", "fail fast" and so on, I really wonder if anyone cares for testing at all. I've personally experienced the potential reputation damage to a Top 5 UK Bank from the failed launch of a new payment system. However, what really matters is the extent of naivette of fintech startups and their VC investors.

Nice article in itself. Especially since it covers a favorite topic (payments tech) and includes quotes from two of my favorite authors (Samuel Johnson & John Irving). But I can't help wondering if it's mistitled because I couldn't find even a single mention of a word from the title of the article ("innovation") in the body of the article.

Nice post. I'll add "full refund for faulty goods and services" as one more benefit of credit cards versus debit cards and credit transfers. 

Five Ways For Banks To Boost Credit Card Use

It took me 2 weeks to get a fully functional business account in a traditional bank. Compared to that, TIDE sounds like a dream. On 0:36 of the video, it says "TIDE is not a bank, so there are no monthly fees". Does that mean that the bank where the account is held - presumably Barclays - will charge monthly fees?

For a frictionless login process, many fingerprint scanners encourage enrolment of *all* fingers at one time e.g. iPhone, Lenovo ThinkPad laptop. And many users, including me, accept the suggestion to do so in order that we can swipe any finger without having to remember which finger we enrolled on which reader. If fingerprint creds are stolen - creepiness alert! - another hand is the only choice for many people.

Even the government seems to be worried about the biometric equivalent of password resets now!

Bank regulators urged to address security of biometric data

Biometrics has been the future of payment authentication for the last decade or longer. Hope it moves into the present. But the recent spate of data breaches tells me that it might actually move into the past before that. I shudder to think of the equivalent of "password reset" in the biometric world.

@JeremyStevens: TY for your reply. Like I hinted with Mint, tools might not work in a B2C environment. Assuming your company sells such tools, have you tried an outcome-based service enabled by your toolset? Going by the success of PMS, your toolset's ability to deliver 200-500% increase in interest income could make a blockbuster out of such a service.