Fintech

I seem to have been immersed in APP fraud recently, mainly because the UK government is introducing new laws to manage such fraud on October 7. What is APP fraud? It is an Authorised Push Payment. It’s basically where you pay for something voluntarily which is not real, such as a parcel delivery that is…

For some reason, I’ve just been bombarded with emails about the secret memo from venture capital firm Sequoia, about their investment twenty years ago in YouTube. Maybe it’s because it’s only just come to light or maybe it’s because it provides the secret sauce of how to achieve a successful early funding round. For me,…

I find it weird as my news waves have recently been drowning in pay-by-bank PR and marketing. Finally, I decided to see what this pay-by-bank news was all about and it turns out that it’s the USA finally allowing A2A payments. Wow, big news … not. The thing about the USA is that their payments…

I find it hard to believe that two years ago I was writing about a fintech bloodbath and, two years later, it continues. The drying up of funding, the post-pandemic recession, the way in which the markets were moving from funding to divesting. It seemed a bit unreal. So, has it got better? No. In…

Anton Golib, Founder & President of SwissAssetDAO, just dropped an interesting update on DAO. What is a DAO? Well, let’s turn to Wikipedia: A decentralised autonomous organisation, sometimes called a decentralised autonomous corporation, is an organisation managed in whole or in part by decentralised computer program, with voting and finances handled through a blockchain. In general…

I find it interesting that most reportage of fintech is very much B2C focused. We talk a lot about Stripe, Adyen and Klarna; we talk about A2A, P2P and PIS; we talk a lot about challenger banks and neobanks; we talk a lot about retail and consumer markets. We don’t talk so much about B2B…

I just spotted a new innovation in India from Paytm, who I consider friends of mine after interviewing their founder, Vijay Shekhar Sharma for Digital Human a few years ago. What’s the innovation? Talking payments. The Paytm soundbox – which works both online and offline with QR codes – allows merchants and customers to hear their transactions…

In a long feature, Bloomberg describes how Donald Trump has become a crypto fan. Trump Bitcoin 2024: How NFTs Made Him a Crypto Cheerleader – Bloomberg My reading: it’s based on his vanity. The cryptoworld created a whole range of NFT trading cards of Trump a few years ago and, because it made a lot…

I just found an interesting blog by Plaid: 10 fintech trends for 2024 that define the industry’s future What are the 10 fintech trends? Trend #1: Consumers will use more fintech apps than ever Trend #2: Fintech increasingly provides financial stability during uncertain times Trend #3: Emerging payment technologies will become as normalized as the…

Sitting down to blog today, I wondered what was the difference between A2A and P2P. I’m sure you know that A2A is Account-to-Account and P2P is Peer-to-Peer, but surely they are one and the same thing? Ahem, no. According to Brite, a player in the open banking space: Account-to-account payments are direct transfers of funds…