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I agree that Challenger Banks haven't done anything inherently digital. In fact, I'd posted this question on Twitter recently: 

Product is good old mortgage. Distribution is via good old physical intermediaries. How will @atom_bank disrupt banking?

Re. your point about banks proactively alerting potential homebuyers to affordability, I think this was called Activity Based Marketing by The Financial Brand or Snarketing a few years ago. I read somewhere recently that adoption of ABM apps has been lacklustre. Maybe traditional and digital banks should improve awareness of their ABM offerings.

How sad. UK banks do FPS, PayM, contactless and other innovative things but find themselves at the bottom of the CX table. Whereas, US banks don't do any such thing but manage to take the top position on CX (Source: FORRESTER)!

Already? I barely finished reading the FORTUNE article Here’s How Citigroup Is Embracing the ‘Fintech’ Revolution that waxed eloquent about how Stephen Bird, CEO of global consumer banking for Citi, and Heather Fox, CEO of Citi FinTech, are going to create "a financial technology startup within the megabank". But the last section of the article exposed such a fundamental disconnect between vision and execution that this latest development shouldn't come as such a big surprise.

Notwithstanding Apple Pay's sluggish adoption, I read somewhere that it handles 2X more mobile payments than Google Wallet and Samsung Pay. And Apple Pay has disavowed VAS whereas Google's business model relies on VAS via collection and monetization of customer information. This should be food for thought for anyone still bold enough to venture into mobile wallets. 

There's one more reason why innovation favors the bold: Opportunities for innovation lie more often than not in exploiting “regulatory gaps”, as I'd highlighted in my latest blog post Fintechs Need Marketers And Lobbyists, Not Lawyers.

I too thought a sample size of 1K can't yield any statistically significant results for a population of nearly 300M. When I saw more comments expressed along the same lines, I Googled around. Seems like I'm mistaken:

1. Per online calculator available here, a sample size of 1006 yields a 95% confidence value of results with 3% error margin for a population of 300M. Click here for details.   
2. Not convinced with the above, I found a formula to calculate error margin here. When I plugged in the values, I found the results tallying with #1. Click here for details.

I was also intrigued by the following line on the online calculator website:

“The sample size doesn't change much for populations larger than 20,000.” 

Not sure if theory of statistics has changed or survey methodologies have improved (or something else) since I studied the subject years ago but a survey sample size of 1K does seem to suffice to draw conclusions about a 300M population size. While I'd love to be proved wrong, it's hard to dismiss this survey so easily.

America has very low tolerance to friction compared to RoW. Not surprisingly, as I'd highlighted in Mitigating Fraud Does Not Pay The Bills, the migration to EMV is meeting with severe resistance.

@João Bohner: TY for your agreement! But I must admit that there are times when I've asked myself the same question that forms the title of this post. I've described my experiences and recommendations on my company blog "Can Something Be Too Frictionless?" (hyperlink removed to comply with Finextra Community Rules but this post will appear on top of Google Search results when searched by the title).

Just came across "Disruption is not a strategy". The author Jerry Neumann explains Uber's approach succinctly: "The new market was available because Uber first ignored, then lobbied to change, regulations that made that market seemingly unavailable to new entrants."  

Good post. This totally resonates with my experience against a very similar background.