Month: August 2017

It’s 2017. It’s a shame that adding a ‘beneficiary’ on a bank website or app is so tedious.

The intended recipient digs out and copies their account number and IFSC, texts or dictates it to the sender, who adds it to their NetBanking app. This Add Beneficiary form’s error avoidance techniques include typing in the account number twice, once occluded (!). The IFSC is typed, then looked up, then confirmed. Then there’s a half-hour wait for this beneficiary to be finally available.

How simple it should be for banks to agree on a straightforward QR code representation of a bank account number + IFSC code + account holder name.

Print it on every debit card.

Put a big button on the home screen of the NetBanking app to show the QR code.

Send QR stickers to customers, especially businesses, on request, as they do a chequebook. Businesses can simply put it up on counters, cabs even on their seat-backs.

When you’re with the recipient, just scan the QR code with your bank app and boom – you’re done in five seconds.

And when you receive a QR code on chat, tap it and ‘Send to <BANK APP>’ from the iOS or Android share sheet so it’s immediately added and available in the bank app.

Why stop at bank account numbers and IFSC? Make a similar standard QR code for UPI handles too.

The sender simply scans the code and sends it money, not worrying about getting usernames and numbers and codes right.

This is not hard.

My bank tells me my customer status will likely be downgraded:

Banks measure their customers’ value by the amount of money they maintain in their bank account and fixed deposits. This makes sense for the bank; these deposits are what they lend.

This measure, though, is increasingly at odds with customers’ own interests.

Money in a bank account will lose value against inflation. ‘Safe money’ in a fixed deposit is better placed in a liquid fund or ultra short term debt fund; these funds invest in much the same debt instruments as a bank would, and yield marginally better returns than FDs, without an early withdrawal penalty. Anything above this is best invested. But even though most banks have sister stock broking companies (HDFC Securities, ICICI Securities) for their customers to invest in liquid funds and stocks or other equity mutual funds, these investments don’t count against customer value.

A bank’s ideal customer will leave lots of cash lying in their bank account or in FDs, unproductive for the customer but highly attractive for the bank.

This divergence of interests is what so many financial startups look to address and make money off. Scripbox, Fisdom, ET Money, WealthTrust, Clearfunds, FundsIndia, Zerodha, Smallcase, Piggy, Goalwise, Sqrrl, Cube, PeSave, Orowealth, ArthaYantra, 5nance among many others all have different takes on making it easy for individuals to make better use of their money. The user experience, accessibility (via apps or mobile websites) and simplicity of this new generation of financial services is so much better – albeit the bar that banks and their sister companies set is abysmal – that, for instance, an HDFC bank customer would rather park their money with one of these services than with HDFC Securities.

This looks like the telecom sector from a decade ago. Operators (carriers) viewed anything beyond voice and sms as a ‘value added service’ including, for the longest time, even mobile internet access. Their interests – maximising super high margin voice and sms revenue – quickly diverged from their customers’ – using the Internet on their phones (and everything that the internet made possible: the web, email, apps, maps, all sorts of messaging, payments, games, crystal-clear video and audio calls). And companies that had nothing to do with telecom – Apple, Google, Skype, Amazon and dozens others – now dominate ‘mobile’.

In less than a decade, operators have become little more than dumb pipes for data, warring it out by making internet access ever cheaper. It seems inevitable that this is what’s going to happen with banks. They’ll be dumb pipes for money, competing only with ever-higher interest rates.

“What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.”


– David Foster Wallace, Oblivion, 2004.

From the FAQ for the website Time Well Spent, which advocates more mindful use of technology, and recommends apps to achieve this. Which leads to the question


So the solution to technology is more technology?

A: Absolutely not. We don't need more apps or technology, but we need to change the fundamental design for how devices orchestrate the interactions between us and the things that want our attention. Today the Attention Economy is like a city with lots of pollution and accidents. We don't fix the city by telling residents to leave (turn devices off). We also don't fix the city by extending the same structure of the city that led to the problems. We fix the city by adding bike lanes, blinker signals and crosswalks to restructure people's interactions so there's less pollution and fewer accidents.


Worli Seaface on a Monday afternoon. A quiet hour or so spent with sluggish clouds, engorged waves and windsurfing crows. As meditative experiences go, this featureless stretch may be the most conducive.

Marine Drive near Princess Street, a Saturday morning. More activity in fifteen minutes here than the hour on Monday, none of it raucous though. More evidence of civilisation, more colour, in one turn of the head here than a walk down its counterpart up the coast. If loneliness is your demon, Marine Drive is your charm.

The iOS Messages app has no way to block alphanumeric sender IDs, either in iOS 10 or in the iOS 11
public beta (as of August 2017).

The app displays a Block this caller menu option against the contact details, but tapping it does nothing, so perhaps it's a long-ignored bug:

There's also nothing an iOS user can do (other than toggling Do not disturb for each such sender ID) because neither does iOS allow a third party app to be set as the default messaging app, nor does it allow programmatic access to SMS, which would at least let a third party app scan and erase such spam.

In past years this oversight was a minor annoyance. This has become a significant problem now as we increasingly use our mobile number as an identifier on online services, and in more ways than is obvious.

For instance not only do e-commerce companies themselves store your mobile number, but also their delivery partners, who need your number in order to call for directions or otherwise. Several office buildings now not only require your mobile number in their entry log, but also verify it with a one time password.

It's a perfect storm: your mobile number is more widely available than ever before, SMS costs have dropped vastly in the last decade, and the SMS app has become the highest priority inbox on people's phones: OTPs, financial notifications, package delivery statuses are all sent as SMSes, so there is no question of turning off notifications for this app.

There's every incentive to cheaply market services both bogus and legitimate over SMS, and consequently every incentive to steal and sell poorly protected mobile number logs.

Apple has built great protection for privacy and from spam into Safari: first Reader Mode, then support for content blockers, and now the use of machine learning to block trackers across websites in iOS 11. Apple's Mail app has also long supported marking email as Junk, and its junk filter seems to have gotten better over each major iOS release.

Given this history, as well as Apple's recent focus on building features into the Messages app, it seems strange that it has ignored elementary spam control for so long.