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There's no doubt that a checking account from a traditional bank has several friction hotspots. A company committed to superior CX like Amazon does have a great opportunity to take the CX of a checking account to the next level, with low hanging fruits in several areas e.g. (1) Frictionless account opening (2) Better transaction search (3) Improved traceability of payments. 

As for disruptive potential of Amazon's plans, it all depends on how Amazon plans to execute them: If it will acquire a banking license on its own, then it can disrupt other banks but, then, one bank disrupting another bank(s) is old news. OTOH, if Amazon is merely going to resell checking accounts of existing banks like JPMC, then, like SQUARE et al, Amazon will increase the reach of traditional banks and add to their revenues and profits instead of disrupting them.

TBH we've been hearing that "mobile self-checkout" is the future of shopping for several years. It hasn't become anything like that during this period. Now, in the day and age of Amazon Go, I think mobile self-checkout's days are numbered.

True dat @FinextraMember, I remember using self-checkout at Waitrose and other supermarkets more than 10 years ago in UK. I actually meant "mobile self-checkout" solutions aka Scan & Go aka Self-Scanning. TY for pointing out that there's a big difference. 

I can understand how "Customers will be able to scan products" - that's quite established for ages. More interesting thing to know is how retailers will ensure that customers do indeed scan products they put into their shopping basket i.e. don't steal. This has been the bugbear of self-checkout solutions and has prevented them from going mainstream for a long time. 

Technology for financial services has been around for over 50 years. Not sure why fintech - used in that context - is a buzzword now. Virtually every finserv tech mentioned in this post has been around for 10-20 years if not longer than that. I myself onboarded Internet Banking and Stock Trading and applied for credit card online and paid insurance premium online in ~2000, experienced Chatbots / Virtual Agents, Mobile Banking and Omnichannel Banking in ~2010.  

If not for Blockchain, I'd have concluded that this post was written 10 years ago and forgotten to be published until now:).

Nice post but some of its conclusions might be a bit different had it taken into account a few recent updates. From 1 March 2018, all mobile wallets in India require full KYC, which includes Aadhaar Number linkage. My bank wallet PayZapp seems to be automatically KYC-compliant - I did nothing but got an SMS to confirm that KYC is done. However my fintech PayTM wallet is not. Contrary to what finsurgents say, it's the banks that permit branchless Aadhaar linkage - PayTM insists on visits to physical stores, which often have defective fingerprint readers. According to doomsday predictions, fintech mobile wallets in India are staring at a 80% drop in volumes as a result of this new mandate. It also doesn't help that PayTM has started suffering erosion of trust, as I highlighted in my latest post PayTM Shows How Fintechs Can Lose Trust.

Totally agree with @MelvinHaskins. Financial advisors keep saying "you can't time the markets". But history has shown that timing probably matters more than anything else in determining rate of returns of various financial investment products.

In my blog post Stocks Always Underperform Fixed Deposits (hyperlink removed to comply with Finextra Community Rules but this post should appear on top of Google Search results when searched by its title), I referenced an article that studied trends from March 1992 to March 2012 and concluded that fixed deposits outperformed stocks. As I pointed out that in my post, if the study had started just one year later, the article would've reached exactly the opposite conclusion.

@RodneyFarmer:

Is there a typo in your last line? Did you actually mean 10 months? Having worked for a CBS company, I've been hearing predictions of the death of CBS for 10-15 years, still CBS is around. For something like CBS to go away needs a disruptive shock to come along. If such a shock happens, in today's fast moving world, CBS will get uprooted in a few months. If such a shock does not happen, CBS will only get more entrenched than it is today and won't go away even after 20 years. Millennials, Microservices, and many other drivers mentioned by you are all flavors of the current season. They themselves will get replaced by some other flavors of the season in the next 3-5 years. No way they'll impact CBS after 10-20 years.

Oh Affirmative Action is still very much alive in USA. It may be optional but it's not illegal.

@MelvinHaskins: Isn't that the goal of Affirmative Action? And isn't Affirmative Action legal??