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@HiteshThakkar:

TY for your comment, which has helped elevate my understanding of the anatomy of the PNB scam a little bit. Would be great if you could share your thoughts on (1) How did this fraud go undetected for so many years? (2) What's the most common workflow used by other banks that'd prevent even a single instance of this fraud?

AFAIK, human users initiate payment transactions on core or other payment processing systems, after which the message is untouched by human hands as it is submitted automatically by those systems to the SWIFT Gateway system, which then sends it out to the SWIFT network. But, even in that workflow, I'm guessing sysadmins can still input a payment directly on the SWIFT Gateway. Any idea how a bank can prevent that from happening?

TY for your kind words @AnonFinextraMember.

On a side note, I must add Cash is the enemy to the list of counterproductive actions from the "War on Cash" Brigade that has pushed out the cashless / lesscash outcome further away.

To paraphrase Al Capone (a former Mafia Don), you can get a lot more done with cash and cashless than with cashless alone. 

Since I'm a payments tech professional, I have a vested interest in the growth of cashless / lesscash. However, IMO, silly, reality-defying and headline-bait posts like this are the enemy in the drive to achieve that outcome. I've shared some alternatives in How To Really Kill Cash.  

@DavidGodfrey: I don't know the exact figures but I can bet that the amount lost to criminal activity associated with electronic payments is 10X more than that associated with cash. If SWIFT is not an MOP, neither is cash - as someone who lived in India in November 2016, I only know too well how suddenly sovereign guarantees can be revoked. Besides, the point is moot: The PNB scam involved no cash and that's the real point - fraud can happen with any way you pay and not just when you pay with cash.

The currently unraveling $1.8B fraud at India's Punjab National Bank happened entirely via SWIFT, the mother of all electronic payment methods.

Congratulations Australia, only 8 years later and 950 million dollars costlier than India. 

In an era where banks have been fined billions for enabling money laundering via EFT, and cryptocurrencies facilitate crime totally electronically - blaming cash for crime is totally reality-defying. 

Perfect use case for Blockchain. Not because Centralized Escrow Apps are broken. But because Blockchain dApps can deliver lower operating costs. Just as in the case of Flight Delay Insurance.

@AlexKreger:

This disruption thingy is not new. It has been talked about for the past several years. However, it hasn't come anywhere close to happening. Traditional finserv continues to be the most profitable industry in FORTUNE 500. Actually, what has happened in reality is, those who chanted the disruption mantra have changed their tune and have started chanting the partnership mantra for the last 2-3 years. Against that backdrop, the claim that time will put anything in place is totally disconnected from ground realities and is something that Finextra Readers are only too aware of, which is what I want to insistently (sic) prove.

If only people switched from Google to any one of half a dozen other search engines with the click of a mouse, Google wouldn't be facing (IMO unfair) charges of monopoly. Against that backdrop of actual consumer behavior in a product category where switching providers is totally frictionless, the claim "changing banks is a click away" utterly defies reality. ICYMI, according to the old adage, "Switching banks is more painful than root canal surgery".