Payments

I’ve said continually that firms like Google and Amazon will never open a bank. I still believe that this will be the case – Facebook and Apple also fall into this view – and mainly hold this view because these companies would find full service banking a difficult and unprofitable space. In fact, I’ve blogged…

I was chairing a conference on blockchain and distributed ledgers the other day. The audience were a mixture of start-ups and banks, and the speakers were talking about how they viewed the world of distributed ledger developments. Many of the banks had successfully complete proofs of concept projects and were now moving to pilots. It…

Following on from the discussions about identity on Monday, it gets interesting to think about the customers’ data and who owns it, especially in light of the Payment Services Directive 2, PSD2 for short, which comes into force at the start of next year.  The regulation forces banks to open account information to third parties…

I now think I am a good friend of Pablo García Arabéhéty, CGAP’s Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean. This is, in part, because he’s contributed one of the key pieces I’m using in my new book Digital Human (due for release next Spring), and partly because we met at the CIAB conference last week,…

I grew up with America as the dream. However, in the past two decades, China has become the second world superpower, whether the Americans like it or not. This is not me having a love thing for China. It’s just a fact. The Americans don’t like it. Google China as a superpower and most US…

I had an interesting experience in Lebanon recently, where the accepted currency is the Lebanese pound or the US dollar. In fact, the US dollar is preferred as, since the civil war in the country, the Lebanese pound has been tied to the US dollar at 1500 Lebanese pounds per dollar.  Everywhere around the country…

I really enjoyed a recent article on CGAP (the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor). If you don’t know them, CGAP is a global partnership of over 30 leading organizations that seek to advance financial inclusion. Housed at the World Bank, CGAP’s mission is to improve the lives of poor people by spurring innovations and…

I talked earlier about the homogenization of the world as we are all become globally connected, seeking global brands using a global language through global platforms.  I truly believe that will happen, as it’s the natural outcome of the fourth age of humanity where we become digital humans, but there’s a long way to go….

One company that is seeking global domination is Ant Financial. The company has an open stated intention to reach two billion users by 2025.  The way in which they’ll achieve that is through local partnerships, and many of those have been started already: Ant Financial invests in Thailand’s Ascend Money as part of global expansion…

I spend a lot of time talking with my friends in Turkey, particularly since the big change in climate after the protests last year.  Nevertheless, from a financial markets point of view, it’s a fascinating place.  One of the first to be contactless and, more recently, one of the first to offer social retail banking….