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Surprised there's so much difference - these days, a lot of Trad Media is anyway just dissection of social media posts and comments therein. 

Oops Lentra, not Lettra.

@Melvin Haskins + 1.

My ex-employer Citicorp Information Technology India Limited (CITIL) was carved out from the inhouse IT department of Citibank in circa 1985, received funding from Citi Ventures a few years later, dropped the Citicorp from its name when it IPOd in circa 2000 under the name of i-flex solutions.  

It was the sale of Citi Ventures' stake to Oracle in 2005 that led to i-flex becoming a subsidiary of Oracle Inc. and subsequently being renamed to Oracle Financial Services Software Limited.

(Why it's still a separate listed company with its own name instead of becoming a division of Oracle is a story for another day.)

Memory serves, Citi Ventures subsequently invested in a few more providers of financial technology in India e.g. Polaris. 

Lettra is certainly not the first fintech investment of Citi Ventures in India. Although, I must admit, the term "fintech" was - wait for it - "Avant La Lettre" when the VC arm of Citicorp made the CITIL and Polaris investments.

A consumer goods retailer in India offered installment purchase of transistors in the 1950s. Car dealers offer loans for purchase of automobiles all the time. These are examples of "non-financial providers that are offering financial services". But I'd claim that they are NOT embedded finance.

Fintech is not financial technology but a category of company that uses (whatever) technology to sell financial products like checking account,
credit card, BNPL loan, etc. Ergo it's a Vertical.

Likewise, Embedded Finance is not a non-financial company but a technology-cum-business-process that's used by a non-financial company to offer financial services as an integral part of its core product / platform. Ergo it's a Horizontal. By definition, the offeror of Embedded Finance will belong to
IT Vertical or BaaS line of business of a Bank, but not to any other non-financial services vertical.

I'm a little queasy with your example of Crystal. As it is, customers of a cryptoexchange are exhorted to self-custody their crypto holdings ("no keys no coins"). With the bankruptcy of the world's second largest cryptoexchange FTX just now, I'm not sure how many people will want to keep their fiat deposits in the form of a virtual card offered by the cryptoexchange. (In India, according to recent mandate by the capital markets regulator, trad brokers must return unused cash deposits to customer's bank accounts once a week.)

Against that backdrop, I'd like to propose a different example for Embedded Finance: Tenant pays house rent with credit card on real estate portal, which sends the money to the landlord's bank account as always.  

Keen to know your thoughts on my understanding of Embedded Finance and the above example. Thanks in advance.

Nice post.

Back when I worked in Oracle Financial Services, my ORG had published an article on Fraud Detection & Prevention for Credit Card payments and the company had started work on building an FD&P system for all methods of payments including checking account, debit card, etc. One challenge was False Positive. While algorithms were in vogue, AI / ML was not a thing at the time (late 2000s). 

Keen to know if AI / ML is helping minimize False Positives?

ACH, so extremely low / zero interchange / MDR compared to debit card? Of course, that only answers the question of "What's in it for Merchants?". 

As for "What's in it for Customers?", not a single A2A method of payment that I know has answered it convincingly in the last 10+ years, so I won't single out this product from JPMC / MC.

Memory serves, MasterCard itself had launched an A2A (but RTP) in UK some 4-5 years ago and shut down a year or two later.

Confirmation of Payee has been around to vet ID for two years. Any idea why impersonation scams are still a thing?

As I highlighted in Fraud v Scam: Who Is Liable For Cybercrime, a typical APP scam involves not only the Payor Bank and Payee Bank but also the Alleged Scammer (obviously), one or more TELCOs, ISP, Electric Utilities, and so on.

IMO, any cross-sector action to tackle APP scam - and apportion liability therefrom - should cover these nonbanking sectors as well. 

When I wrote Open Banking: EU v. USA six months ago, there were 5M users of EU Open Banking in a population of nearly 450M people, and 80M users of US Open Finance in a population of 330M people. Plaid alone had 6000 fintech partners in USA. 

For anyone looking for low hanging fruit use cases for Open Banking, the vast canvas of US Open Banking apps should be a good starting - if not also ending - point.

In a former life, I used to sell the Corporate-to-Bank solution of a leading ERP company. Within the company, we used our lead banker's C2B solution for the processing vendor payments. That was over 10 years ago. 

Being VC-backed, this startup may be under no pressure to post profits for the forseeable future. To that extent, it might be able to undercut the prices of the incumbent solution providers. Keen to know if it plans to differentiate its product on core functionality.

According to early indications, liquidity crunch at FTX has stemmed from its crypto broking, rather than crypto exchange, line of business. Calling it "Broker Exchange" would reflect the situation better than "Exchange".

FWIW, that reclassification would stop people from dismissing this incident with the catchall "crypto is a big scam" remark - many people are familiar with bankruptcies of fiat brokers but I doubt if anyone has heard of bankruptcy of a fiat exchange.