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In HBR's What Is Disruptive Innovation?, Clayton M. Christensen, the founder of the disruptive innovation theory, writes that UBER is NOT an example of disruption.

Letting that pass: Amazon / Google may be creating jobs, building offices, etc. But they've also destroyed jobs and shuttered premises at mom-and-pop stores and traditional publishing industry. How do we know that their net contribution to GDP has been positive?

Assuming there's some way to prove that their net contribution to GDP has been positive, it can be argued that the same method can be used to prove that AirBnB and Uber's net contributions to GDP have also been positive. For example, AirBnB makes outstation stay cheap, it can be argued that so many people who didn't travel on vacation earlier because of high cost of hotels are now undertaking the travel because AirBnB has made stay affordable, which makes AirBnB GDP-accretive. As I'd highlighted in http://lnr.li/PVpK1, a similar argument can be made in favor of UBER as well.

Now, all that was only in terms of revenues, which is a measure of worth of a company in the traditional economy. Valuation / market cap is a major measure of a company's worth in the new digital economy. Whether we like the new metric or not, AirBnB and UBER have done extremely well on the valuation measure - arguably even better than Amazon and Google.

AFAIK, AML was never meant to ferret out fraudsters and block electronic fund transfers directed to them. Unless KYC documents mysteriously get stamped with remarks like "Fraudster", "Scam Artist", and so on, I doubt if any amount of KYC due diligence will prevent such scams. Even then, there'll always be the first-time fraudster - or habitual fraudster masquerading as a first time fraudster under a different identity - who can't be caught. Somewhat like the best antivirus detection software still can't prevent a "zero day attack".

@HiteshThakkar: TY for your reply. Look forward to knowing more...

Nice article. Ever since I discovered ICICIdirect, e*trade and other e-trading platforms in circa 2000, I haven't spoken to a single human broker. I don't have any personal experience with private wealth management - sigh:( - but I remember reading about this British celebrity who had a bank balance of GBP 25M + and still got bad service from his bank's private wealth advisor. It's not hard to believe the predictions of the rise of robo-advisors.

@HiteshThakkar:

Brilliant one. I've had countless accounts with many banks in India over the years and I never knew of this HUF type of account. Yet another reminder that banks can learn a few things from tech marketing, which creates buzz today for features that will be launched next year!

Any idea if HUF is available for non-Hindu families, who also can obviously have the same need?

Payee confirmation was the first of my Five Ways to Stimulate Electronic Payments. When I was involved in the implementation of FPS for a Top 5 UK bank, I was told that this feature can't be supported because it would be tantamount to one bank coming to know another bank's customer information.

Not sure whether this is a genuine interpretation of customer confidentiality laws in UK or yet another cock-and-bull story told by banks to justify status quo instead of taking steps to improve CX.

I had a torrid time linking just one Aadhaar # to a bank account.

Linking Aadhaar Number To Bank Account

Good luck linking multiple #s!

@AFinextraMember:

TY for your clarification. I assumed sequential meant incremented by 1.

Any idea why FCA would need to contact British lenders to see "if they too are using a sequential numbering scheme for their cards"? Since they must all be generating their numbers using some algorithm, isn't it obvious that they're indeed using a sequential numbering scheme?

How's this possible? I thought V/MC rules require card numbers to be compliant with MOD 10 / Luhn algorithm, which ensures that they won't be sequential?

@TomHay + 1. "Incumbent power", I guess!