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As an IT vendor, I've observed the finserv industry from the outside for 25+ years. While it may not be the fastest industry around, it has proven itself to be highly innovative by inventing the following products. 

1. Credit card. 50 years after it was invented, I still can't think of a single other payment product that permits realtime transactions anywhere in the world between buyers and sellers who don't know each other. Cash is still its only viable competition.
2. ARM, CDO, CDO2, CDS, MBS and a slew of structured financial products. These have made a lot of money for the industry.
3. HDFC Bank PayZapp. Easily the best mobile wallet for bill pay - and I've come to this conclusion after trying out alternatives from fintech and TELCOs. HDFC Bank's PayZapp Ends My Bill Payment Woes

What's more, finserv has managed to be a very profitable industry:

• Financial services was the most profitable sector in FORTUNE GLOBAL 500 in 2013: http://ow.ly/d/3qCc

• Finserv continues to be a very profitable sector. 6 out of 10 most profitable FORTUNE GLOBAL 500 corporations in 2015 are banks. https://twitter.com/GTM360/status/642284454409584641

Premature decision? Couldn't Amazon have sustained this product on the back of the captive volumes from its new brick-and-mortar bookstore in Seattle?

I wasn't proposing social media login for banking. The moment you allow that government services require stronger ID, you leave yourselves open for different parts of the government to assert the same thing for themselves and disparate e-ID systems are the inevitable result. For example, my government electricity supplier lets me know my bill amount and pay my bill with very weak ID. Whereas my Income Tax Department requires my company to use USB token based digital signature in order to file my corporate tax return. How can these two government entities accept a single e-identity service, whether provided by bank or anybody else? The problem is exacerbated many times over in countries with a federal structure of government where state governments are fairly autonomous e.g. Germany, India, USA.

@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.