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Great post. Resonates very well with my experience of seeing fintechs trying to sell to banks. Big reason for the disconnect I've observed is, fintechs rely on Innovators and Early Adopters whereas most midsize to large banks belong to Early Majority and Late Majority stages of the technology adoption lifecycle / chasm.

On a side note, why can't you "deliver stimulating and intelligent insights and demonstrate a clear understanding of your audience’s business needs" in a PowerPoint deck? According to unconfirmed reports about the origins of PowerPoint, Christopher Colombus used a PowerPoint slide deck to present his business plan to Queen Isabella for exploration of the New World:) 

I bought travel insurance with a single click on Expedia back in 2000. 

AXA Fizzy - The New Kid On The Blockchain

With AIB, it's confirm existing details, input traveler information, blah, blah, blah, click five times. 

Am very curious to know which customer segment would jump thru' so many hoops to buy travel insurance from AIB in 2018.

Kudos to Barclays Business Banking. Sensible approach. But it will work only if Relationship Managers are really capable of and geared up to doing all these nice things. Which is not the case with RMs at many banks. At the bank where I have my company's business account, I usually prefer the chatbot. The human RM does no-show for meetings and the CX only goes down the drain from there on.

"Just having Open Banking will not stimulate innovation on its own. You have to collaborate to stimulate innovation." LOL I thought Open Banking forced collaboration! 

"This Open Letter highlights what is missing from Open Banking and what needs to be done now to ensure its success." Blockchain can help to ensure success of Open Banking. Open Banking Needs A Blockchain Boost

No, it absolutely won't.

Over the last ten years or so, we’ve being hearing that, unless traditional banks do something about X, “players from outside banking will become the primary providers of financial services.” Over this period, X has changed – from mobile banking and chatboat through to AI and Blockchain – but the threat has flopped consistently. Instead, financial services has remained the most profitable sector in FORTUNE 500 year after year. Big 6 banks in USA have paid $110B in fines for the GFC (https://twitter.com/GTM360/status/992380932135976960) but are more profitable than before. The banking industry has also started outperforming the broader market on one more metric now viz Return to Shareholders (https://twitter.com/s_ketharaman/status/989527153783033856). By now, one would’ve hoped that the finsurgents would’ve seen the writing on the wall and stopped making silly threats. But, alas, one would be wrong. 

What Open Banking will do is to give banks another opportunity to use their tried-and-tested innovation playbook: Don't drink the Kool-Aid of every shiny new technology; Wait & watch for fintech winners; Buy / make only what works. We saw it earlier in Prepaid Card with eCount, in Gift Card, with Revolution Money; in Neobank with Simple; and most recently, in Mobile Wallet, with Zelle. This playbook works very well. Direct-to-Consumer Fintechs chant the disruption mantra only to raise VC funds at frothy valuations. The moment they get an opportunity to flip their companies, they sell out to traditional banks - and out goes all their song and dance about taking care of consumers' interest yada yada yada.  Consumers may be justified in wanting traditional banks to up their game but they're naive to expect Open Banking to achieve that.

@David Godfrey:

TY for your comment.

I’m familiar with standalone modulus check e.g. https://www.iban.com/uk-payment-validation-service.html from even prior to FPS. However, memory serves, it's not mandatory for FPS solutions at individual banks to call that service or validate the account number-sort code combo in any other way before allowing the payment to be submitted. But I could be mistaken. If that validation has now become mandatory for all banks, that's an useful enhancement to FPS.

But I agree that this validation is mere lipstick! Customer will gain real comfort only if the system confirms to them prior to submitting an FPS payment that the Intended Beneficiary Name entered by Payor matches the Actual Beneficiary Name. Back then, banks used to say, Beneficiary Name Verification is not possible because Beneficiary Bank won't reveal names of its customers for reasons of confidentiality / competition. In the PSD2 / Open Banking era, getting the mere name of a customer should be a piece of cake and we might see faster progress on this feature now:)

End of the day, you either ask for permission or seek forgiveness (if you're caught). The other day, Simple's CEO Josh Reich said in a Slate interview that Simple chose the former approach whereas many other fintechs (e.g. PayPal) chose the latter approach. Without advocating one approach over the other, there's a strong correlation between the latter approach and success of startups, particularly in regulated industries, as I highlighted in Fintechs Need Marketers And Lobbyists, Not Lawyers.

@James Piggot: 

Joseph Heller wrote decades ago in his bestseller Picture This, “‘Aristotle Contemplating The Bust of Homer’ is the most valuable painting because it’s the most costly painting; it’s the most costly painting because it’s the most valuable painting”. He was referring to the Rembrandt masterpiece that was the first painting in the world to sell for more than a million dollars.

Bottomline is, valuation is entirely between buyer and seller. As long as somebody is willing to buy shares of a startup at a certain valuation, it’s immaterial what third parties think about the valuation. That said, they say, valuation is always based on future expectations undergirded by past performance and not past performance itself. Also, 0.5M merchants is not small.

@FinextraMember: From time to time, we hear many pundits calling Europe a digital colony of USA. In the aftermath of Walmart's acquisition of Flipkart in India, they've been giving their unsolicited advice on how India can / should avoid becoming another US digital colony. Time will tell whether OB / PSD2 will be able to reverse the trend in Europe.

Totally agree, at least for Query part of the Query-Request-Complaint customer contact framework that I highlighted in Can Chatbots Replace Humans? 

I believe chatbot, and, by extension, "Alexa Banking", has the potential to upend the status quo of digital banking channels for at least two reasons: 

1. With all current digital channels, user has to understand system. With chatbot, system understands user.
2. With Alexa Banking, banking can be done in the background, thereby enabling users to treat banking as a chore that it often really is.

As with PFM / MoMMA, I expect a vibrant debate between bank chatbot and (PSD2-powered) third-party chatbot in the forseeable future.