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Great stuff. Just like the dropping of frivolous lawsuits against Zelle, CapitalOne, etc.

Kudos to UK government for scrapping PSR. IMO its Drunk Under Lamp Post regulation on APP Scam Reimbursement was the last straw. I totally agree with Riccardo Tordera in particular and Hon PM and Chancellor in general.  

This is the same PayTM whose Payments Bank was virtually shut down by RBI last year following seven years of investigations by the banking regulator in which it uncovered several infarctions related to KYC etc. 

But this is also the same PayTM that would not have become a household name had it taken the same approach to regulatory compliance as banks do. 

I also wonder if it would have become famous enough for government to sign up with it to "extend mentorship, infrastructure support, market access, and funding opportunities to (other) startups".

Years after I wrote it, my blog post Fintechs Need Marketers And Lobbyists, Not Lawyers seems to have aged well. 

YaaY, I'd predicted that the UK government would abolish PSR's populist drunk under lamp post regulation re. APP Scam Reimbursement soon after the elections. I never dreamt that it would mull abolishment of PSR itself. Great move, hope it materializes sooner rather than later. 

Stripe and many other fintechs support not only credit card but pay-by-bank payments (via third party integrations) in India, USA, etc. So do many other electronic payment gateways, payment services providers and payments aggregators. In addition, there are payment orchestrators that carry out automatic routing across multiple ePGs based on least cost routing and lowest outage, etc. I'm guessing such fintechs are not common in UK since it seems to be a big deal for a single PSP to support multiple MOPs like credit card and pay-by-bank.  

Onshore workers have pointed to the success of WFH (Work from Home) mode while pushing back on RTO (Return To Office) mandates by their employers. In what's likely an unintended consequence of their pushbacks, their employers have started wondering if there's such a sensational difference in productivity and other metrics between 50 mile remote working and 5000 mile remote working. Like Lloyds Bank, we're seeing tons of banks and companies in other industries moving jobs offshore to their GCCs in India during the last 12-18 months. 

Deployers obviously have the liability to the aggrieved party. Most deployers I've talked to are insisting on back-to-back indemnity from AI provider. Closed source AI providers are accepting indemnity clause in their contract, open source providers are not. 

Whoa great post! Although I first read about DeepSeek last June, I think it launched R1 only a week or 10 days ago. Kudos for taking it on a test drive and posting a comparison so soon.  

If it's not too confidential, can you post details of actual Q&A for one or more of the tested use cases on any one LLM and compare it with the responses from non-AI chatbots of the previous generation? 

IME there are still (fairly knowledgeable and influential) folks who claim that Agentic AI is nothing more than good old "Bots in Uniform". This comparison would help convey the power of genAI over RPA and other traditional bot technologies.

When American Banker  interviewed me about RTR Canada in 2023, I expected it to go live in the next 3-6 months. Even in my wildest dream, I didn't think it'd still be "halfway through the technical build" after nearly two years. At the time, the author of the article noted that Payments Canada hadn't provided a launch date for the service. Seems like that's the case even now.

For the last 2-3 years, whenever the topic of APP Scam comes up and people demand reimbursement from banks, I've been raising the subject of CoP, saying payors jolly well know whom they're paying thanks to CoP and questioning why banks should be held responsible. The uniform answer I get is "CoP has very limited adoption, so it's virtually useless to fight APP Scam". Going by a preponderance of feedback of that nature over many years, I'm not sure if I agree with your contention that UK is ahead of the APP Scam prevention curve by virtue of CoP.

The recent UK PSR mandate stipulating that banks must reimburse victims of APP Scam is the height of Drunk Under Lamp Post regulation and totally belies any claim that UK is ahead of preventing APP Scam. 

I'd like to think that India is most ahead of the curve. Many banks have been supporting CoP for a long time. Even if banks don't, many UPI PSPs do. Furthermore, India has recently introduced another technology - 14C. The moment a victim complains of being scammed to Police Cybercrime, the department enters the payee / scammer account details into a portal and flashes it all banks in realtime. This enables payee banks to stop payment if payee is a known scammer. I doubt if any other country has such a solution.