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@FaisalKhan:

A Silicon Valley based remittance fintech company recently got my attention because it's the only one I know that does B2B cross-border remittances and, that too, using Blockchain. During a concall with me the other day, the founder of this company mused,

1. "We announced support for USD-GBP corridor but I just found out that we need to open a bank account in UK, so that's gone on the backburner until one of us can find the time to visit London."
2. "Yeah, I know we told you we use Blockchain for USD-INR corridor but only last week we found out the procedure for tying up with a BTC Exchange in India, so for now we'll be using regular wire transfer". Of course, that doesn't stop this company from joining the chorus of fintech startups in claiming to destroy banks!

My experience totally resonates with your line "Most companies that I know who are in the remittance space, have never had on-ground experience. They've never visited the beneficiary countries".

Why is this any better than using social media login, which is already quite widespread? In the event of loss of money from bank account, will bank indemnify customer or tell customer to go follow up with each and every website into which they logged in via their bank creds?

I presume for this whole thing to work, the Water ATM operator will require some technology (e.g. card reader) to know how much credit is available on a given prepaid card. Question is who will pay for this technology and whether the cost of this technology has been factored in into the overall business case. Quite often, hidden / ignored CI-CO costs kill many otherwise well-intentioned programs driving cashless behaviors (Cash in Hand Is Worth More Than Card In Bush). And who is to say that villagers even prefer a prepaid card over cash or that they have enough money to fund a (say) week's worth of water supply at one shot when they visit the BC (say) 1X / week? ICYMI, Zomato's founder recently attributed the failure of its Zomato Cashless product at restaurants to the following two factors: (1) Zomato had to supply the tablet required at restaurants for this product to work and this investment would never pay off with the commissions it was earning on the cashless payments (2) This service was received well only by early adopters. The mainstream market never agreed to make the change in behavior dictated by this service. Banks are highly profitable. Perhaps they're better off leaving it to VC-funded startups to try out these services instead of jumping into them by themselves and burning their fingers? 

I find this to be more about retail commerce than retail payments. After all, in your own admission, neither has your florist taken the first step towards payment, which is submission of invoice with account details, nor have you made an "on account" payment.

On a side note, not sure who was your florist but I doubt if any of the leading online florists that appear on Google SERP would agree to deliver a gift without payment in advance. So, even as an example for retail commerce, I must humbly submit that your incident is slightly off the beaten track.

The guy in your comic strip seems to be regretting that he attended the statistics class. By not being able to claim that Correlation Equals Causation, he has forfeited many opportunities to earn 15 minutes of fame. No harm picking up a technique or two from How To Lie With Big Data to make a sensational claim that gets past a couple of publications and gets you your 15 minutes of fame. As long as the reader is no more knowledgeable than the writer, you're good.

Fingerprint. Vein. Iris. Heartbeat. Now brainwave. Not sure whose brainwave this is. To me, this sounds like a terribly harebrained idea!

TL;DR. In any case, since I wrote Calling B.S On Banking The Unbanked, some 120M more bank accounts have been added in India alone, so the unbanked issue, if such a thing ever existed, has reduced. This is also reinforced from personal experience. I came across this person who hails from a tiny village in North Maharashtra that has no bank branch or even ATM. I asked him how he manages to remain unbanked, he laughed at me and told me that he has been having a bank account for over a decade, just that the nearest branch is 30 kms away and nearest ATM is 4 kms away. To me the moral of the story is, anyone who needs a bank account has one and it's a myth that lack of local branch causes unbanked problem. That's not to say that we shouldn't leverage mobile phone technology in banking, but the use case would be to improve CX, not bank the unbanked.

@JamesCranfield: LOL! Proof that what goes around comes around:) Henceforth, whenever a nonbank claims to destroy a bank, I'll take it to mean destroy the bank's latest logo...

@BillTrueman: Not sure why there should be any doubt in my position: In my above comments and in my cited blog post and in my comments to a few other articles on Finextra, I've questioned the value of EMV in USA (though not in ROW). Let me not go into the reasons again other than to observe that factors like "terminal does all checking of customer" are exactly the source of the problem, not solution, and miss my points about dynamics of USA retail behavior being very different from ROW viz. greater demand / supply of CX, lower tolerance to friction of longer transaction time and risk of EMV card being left behind in the terminal.

Not sure how much of an expert Vinod Khosla is about EMV and NFC but, as an early investor in SQUARE, he seems to know a thing or two about what works in the payments business in USA. He's not alone in believing that EMV is not one of them. Low Fraud/Revenue ratio, far greater demand and supply of CX, unnecessary incremental friction imposed on consumers who can get fraudulent transactions, if and when they occur, reversed with a single telephone call - these are at least three reasons why EMV, at least in its present non-contactless form, has a bleak outlook in USA.