Also:

• 🥷 Designing for trust

• 💳 Amazon vs. Visa

• 💥 The wildest insurance fraud scheme 

💸 From PSD2 to request to pay

After nearly two years of slow development and arguing, we're starting to see more and more PSD2 adaptation. It is not the game-changer all the banks feared, but e.g. BN Bank now receives new bank deposits of NOK 40-50 million a week from customers in other banks via PSD2. These customers have discovered that they can move savings to an account with a better interest rate in BN Bank, and at the same time, still have access to the account in their old bank. In Stacc, we've also integrated with multiple PSD2 aggregators lately, like Tink and Neonomics, observing that account-to-account payments have matured a lot over the last half-year.

But what comes after PSD2? According to Sifted, this can be "Request to Pay": Imagine your phone buzzes and you get a notification. It asks if you would like to pay for your coffee, you accept and pick up a latte from the cafe counter. When you accept, the protocol automatically initiates real-time credit to the recipient by drawing funds from the initiator's bank. I must say that I have more faith in this potential solution than PSD2 payments for one reason: Request to Pay potentially requires less context switching for users.

Instead of getting sent to your bank and having to authenticate with bankID, you could get a push notification from your bank and authenticate via FaceId or similar, and the payment goes through. Request to Pay is very much in its infancy. Technical details and the technical scope have not been fully finished, but it will be interesting to follow the evolution over the following years.

🥷 Designing for trust

NRK has written about NFTs and asked if people think NFTs will be the future of ownership. Over 20 000 have answered, and 72% believe it will be. NFTs are still in the early adopters' phase, but it's fascinating when the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation writes about NFTs, and that many people think this is promising. If we compare the adoption of decentralized finance with the adoption of the internet, we're now in 1998 if we compare it to total users.

The biggest challenge for Decentralized Finance going forward is probably design challenges. Paul Stamatiou has written that the current state can work for now since early adopters are motivated enough to jump through hoops to try something new—but this won't scale as billions of users join the DeFi ecosystem in the coming years: Designing for trust.

💳 Amazon vs. Visa

Amazon will stop accepting Visa credit cards in the UK on January 19th (not debit cards). The reason is high fees. Amazon is playing at a large scale with razor-thin margins, and when Visa (and Mastercard) raised the interchange fee Post-Brexit from 0.3% to 1.5%, it cost Amazon 332 million dollars extra a year in fees. Amazon vs. Visa is a global battle: Amazon has introduced a 0.5% fee for using Visa cards in Australia and Singapore. I'll still be surprised if Amazon actually goes through banning Visa credit cards. It's a bold move turning away such a significant portion of their customer base. This is probably more a negotiation tactic to get cheaper fees, but this is certainly not the last time we'll hear about companies trying to make changes with one of the duopoly companies Visa and Mastercard. This move will probably accelerate as we see the rise of account-to-account payments and BNPL.

While we're on the topic of credit cards: how do they make money? Patric McKenzie from Stripe has written about just about every way your card can make money.

💥 The wildest insurance fraud scheme

If you are looking for a long-read for the week this is a fascinating read of how Theodore Robert Wright III destroyed cars, yachts, and planes for over a decade:

The Wildest Insurance Fraud Scheme Texas Has Ever Seen

That's it for this week 👋

Remember, if you’re enjoying this content, please do tell all your (fintech) friends to hit the subscribe button! If you have some topics you want me to cover you can also just hit reply!

Marius Hauken, partner Stacc X