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Just like I said before Brexit!

https://twitter.com/s_ketharaman/status/730057658204606464

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=12420

Even in the most egregious case of breach of trust by a bank - i.e. Wells Fargo example - the money that was unauthorizedly transferred from a customer's account was transferred to another account in the name of the same customer. That's a lot of things but it's not stealing. Whereas when PayPal freezes a merchant account, the merchant never gets back the fees charged by PayPal. That's what I call stealing.

Therefore, inertia is not the reason why people still lend their money to banks. Lack of equally trustworthy alternatives is. Even in the post Wells Fargo world.

In From Multichannel To Omnichannel And Beyond, I'd defined omnichannel as "splitting a single business process across multiple channels in such a way that each channel leveraged its strength and the customer found each hop natural". This comes close to your definition!

ICYMI, according to McKinsey, customers want digital but “not to the exclusion of other channels". The article goes on to say, “many customers want to move freely from channel to channel in an omnichannel experience.” (http://www.mckinsey.com/Business-Functions/Operations/Our-Insights/More-than-digital-plus-traditional-A-truly-omnichannel-customer).

If fintech is defined as companies providing technology to the finserv industry, then banks have not been working in isolation at all. It is common knowledge that BFSI is amongst the largest buyer of technology for decades, with, say, your employer attributing nearly 45% of its revenues to this sector.

If fintech is defined as companies that offer financial products and acquire customers directly, it's common business practice across all industries to fight your competitors rather than partner with them (except in rare examples of "coopetition"). How often do we hear, say, your employer coming out of "isolation" and partnering with its competitors like Accenture or TCS or Wipro?

I got into a Q&A on some blog a few years ago with a Klarna cofounder / CEO. I remember him saying that Klarna charges merchants only 0.5% transaction fees, which is much lower than credit / debit card MSC and also that Klarna has been profitable from Day One!

I wouldn't set the bar that high - 10X better - for a new payment method to gain mainstream adoption. However, a new payment method can't afford to ignore certain obvious benefits of an incumbent payment method either. Credit card payments offer rewards, deferred payment and enhanced fraud protection. I doubt if A2A payment methods will offer these benefits. Therein lies the challenge to their mainstream adoption - apart from the other points mentioned in this post.

This is a classical case of the pendulum swinging to the other extreme after a crisis. There's no way a for-profit company can go without sales targets for too long. I predict that targets will be reinstated in a disguised form in a quarter or two. I don't know a single CEO who will be agreeable to answer to the Board and Wall Street without asking questions about the performance of the sales team!

I've interacted with bots that exhibited greater intelligence than some human operators. And this was in 2010 when I wrote a couple of blog posts describing my experience with both types of agents used by banks, councils and airlines: How Humanlike Are Virtual Agents? (hyperlink removed to comply with Finextra Community Rules but this post will appear on top of Google Search results when searched by the title). In the subsequent six years, I'm sure bots have become even more intelligent.

Whatever B2C fintechs have done so far is largely driven by VC funding. Very few of them would survive on their own P&L/BS. Traditionally VCs are wary of funding B2B ventures. That, more than anything else, will hold back fintechs in B2B - notwithstanding the much bigger B2B finserv market.

My bank will stop sending me statements after I cancel my credit card. How the heck do I "comb through months of statements to check for fraudulent transactions" that happen several months thereafter?