Payments

I was about to write a really nice piece about Apple’s announcement of the launch of a new credit card, in partnership with Goldman Sachs, when Brian Roemmele beat me to it. Who is Brian Roemmele you ask? And if you are asking that … WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? Brian is a great speaker and prolific…

I got a large number of pings over the weekend to read and comment on an article on Medium by Lance Ng headlined: Facebook Plans to Become World’s Biggest Central Bank? It is a conjectured article that takes the story from The New York Times discussing Facebook creating its own cryptocurrency (Facebook and Telegram Are…

I often reflect on how quickly China is moving towards being cashless, as are parts of Africa and much of India. I then realised that it is a strong mix of simple infrastructure and strong incentive. In the case of M-PESA in Kenya, there was no method of making payments from city to village, except…

Wired are really good at writing long, wordy essays on things they find of interest. I enjoy them, but not everyone has half an hour to read their musings. Therefore, as it covers my favourite FinTech firm Stripe, here’s a 1,500 abridged version of their 16 page, 5,000 word original (which you can read here)….

The 11th of November. 11 November. 11/11. Not 9/11 or 5/11. 11/11. For Europeans and Americans, 11/11 means the end of the First World War. The Allies sat down and signed the Armistice Agreement with the Germans at 11:00 (Paris time) on 11th November, 1918, in Compiègne and ended the War. Poland reappeared as a…

It’s a big week of FinTech in Asia with Money 2020 China and the Singapore FinTech Festival (SFF) all taking place in the same week. One of the headlines emerging from SFF was an interview with Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple. The headline is from a Bloomberg interview and reads: Ripple Is Aiming to Overtake…

I was recently asked by TSYS to write a piece celebrating ten years of payments changes, as they are celebrating their ten year birthday of ngenuity, TSYS’s payments magazine. So I wrote something. Here’s your starter for ten: To commemorate the past 10 years of ngenuity, we wanted to look back at how the landscape…

There’s been an interesting but hidden trend taking place. It started in China with Tencent and Alipay and has now gone global. The phenomenon is called QR codes. QR, or Quick Response if you prefer the longer form, is a code that originated in Japan in the 1990s, and has gradually grown from a system…

Venezuela is the latest country to spin into hyperinflation, showing the same signs as the meltdown in Zimbabwe that created the 100 trillion dollar note. Hyperinflation, as defined by economist Philip Cagan in the 1950s, is when a country sees inflation rates rise by more than 50% per month. Wow! Luckily, I’ve never been exposed…

I know I’ve written a lot about China and the Chinese internet giants for the past couple of years, whilst leaving out much of what’s happening in the USA. It’s not to say the USA is boring, but it’s not innovating at the speed, rate or scale of the Chinese internet companies. By way of…