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I was surprised at not finding a single mention of the world's largest retail wallet initiative MCX / CurrentC in this blog post. Then it struck me, had MCX been mentioned, the title of this post would have to be changed to "Digital retail wallet: 1 Reason it doesn't make sense".

Brilliant post.

Oh have we already forgotten how Monzo freezes current accounts?

https://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=30686

When frozen, current accounts can provide a free source of funds to lend at a profit. Hope this is not the kind of devious trick that I'd alluded to in my comment on the previous post. Let's see.

On a side note, a loss of £6.7 million is not even peanuts for an average VC-funded fintech. Not sure why Monzo is compelled to pivot after making such a puny loss.

*cashback - I meant "chargeback".

@RalfOhlhausen:

When I onboarded MINT several years ago, I stopped dead on my tracks when it asked me to handover my NetBanking creds to it. And this was despite its undertaking that it'd use the access for "read only" purposes only i.e. it wouldn't make any transactions on my behalf. If I understand correctly, PISPs are seeking NetBanking creds for the purpose of making transactions OBO consumers. Good luck to PISPs for persuading consumers that their existing payment options are so rotten that their only salvation lies in handing over keys to their kingdom to PISPs. That too, without chargeback protection.

I suspect that PayPal works in PULL mode only when using credit / debit card as funding source and offers chargeback protection to consumers only under these two options. What I do know is that, when it uses PayPal account balance or linked bank account to fund a payment, there's no cashback. I'm no fan of PayPal but it has done rather well for itself by betting its livelihood that bank APIs are fit for purpose and has reached where it has without clamoring for screen scraping.

In this day and age of low latency algo trading, curious to know how the Nasdaq spokesman asserts so confidently that "no trades were completed" at the wrong prices!

It all depends on how cloud is defined.

In its purest form, a CBS vendor has a single, multi-tenanted platform on AWS / Azure and multiple banks access the same software demarcated by, say, subdomains e.g. citi.flexcube.com, jpmc.flexcube.com, barclays.flexcube.com (Couldn't resist the shameless plug for my ex-employer's CBS!). I doubt if there's a single example of that kind of CBS software among large banks.

Now, if we dilute the definition of cloud to shared infra etc., many savings banks, credit unions et al have been using cloud-CBS. In fact, many of them never had any other form of CBS. So, there's no question of moving to the cloud.

Far from being a hurdle to cloud, it could be argued that mainframe-CBS is the most prominent form of cloud-CBS of all times! Dumb terminals, no local storage of data or programs, etc.

@RalfOhlhausen:

TY for your reply. If I've understood this correctly, based on a onetime authorization given by the customer, a PISP can log in multiple times to the customer's bank account and initiate multiple payments on behalf of the customer without any customer intervention for each payment. I agree MyBank, iDEAL et al don't do this. But why is screen scraping required? Won't API / token / equivalent suffice for doing this? Hasn't PayPal been doing this already without screen scraping? (To be clear, I'm referring to the mode in which PayPal pulls funds from a bank account, not credit / debit card).

In 30 years of using multiple payment cards, I've never once felt the need to switch cards ex post facto. So, it's nice to know that the ability to do so is a "common payments problem". But, then, I don't think "leave wallet at home" is a birthright either! 

@RalfOhlhausen:

Re. your comment addressed to @Charmaine, wasn't EBA Clearing's myBank meant to provide the kind of risk-free payment that PISPs are now supposed to provide? When I heard about plans for its launch in 2011, I predicted that it would be a big hit (https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=5453). But I haven't heard much about it since then.