Payments

I recently was hauled up over saying that Western Union (WU) was being disrupted by FinTech.  The words that a reader took issue with are: The high fees of Western Union and other remittance providers were fairly punishing … until FinTech came along Western Union is being disrupted, to an extent, but this person was…

I blogged a year ago about TechFin, the incumbents’ view of applying technology to existing banking services, versus FinTech which seeks to transform the financial system.  That has become one of the top search terms to find my blog, as it turns out, mainly because my blog entries are the first to be returned when searching…

I was asked this question at a recent conference and yes, banks do believe that the mass poor are just that: poor.  How do you make a profit out of the poor?  Well, truth be told, the poorest are the most profitable.  They’re the ones who need loans and go overdrawn, and therefore pay all…

I’ve just been alerted by friend Gijs Boudewijn to the release of a fascinating white paper by BIS, the Bank for International Settlements (the guys who do Basel stuff and are big cohonez in banking circles).  Their Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures released Distributed ledger technology in payment, clearing and settlement: an analytical framework…

I recently blogged about the lack of obvious return on investment for immediate (also called faster, instant or real-time) payments, and mentioned that I would be launching research about this.  Well that research survey is now live.  It will only take you ten minutes, so please join in by clicking this link. Just to put…

It made me laugh today.  I was chairing a panel where Romana Kumar, Head of Global Transaction Banking for the National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD), was discussing their trial of Ripple.  The background to this was announced in a press release on 1st February 2017: Ripple’s Distributed Financial Technology fits within NBAD’s existing infrastructure…

I outlined yesterday the fact that 98% of money laundering goes unchecked, allowing $1.6 trillion a year to be used for terrorist funding, drug dealers, sex traffickers and possibly worse.   This was prompted by a conversation about AML (Anti-Money Laundering) with the CEO and Co-Founder of I met Coinfirm, Pawel Kuskowski. So what’s the solution, is how…

I was surprised the other day when I met Pawel Kuskowski, CEO and Co-founder of Coinfirm, a start-up firm offering Compliance-as-a-Service.  Pawel has been trained in compliance and AML, having worked with some of the world’s biggest financial institutions including AIG (Compliance Officer), UBS (Director of Compliance, Compliance and Operational Risk Officer) and RBS (Head…

We had a fun session of the Financial Services Club this week, in light of the lack of clarity on Brexit from the UK Gov.  The discussion was our regular New Year kick-off meeting with special guest David Doyle, sage of all EU regulations affecting Financial Services.  David provided us with great insight into the…

In case you missed it, there was an important keynote speech by Yves Mersch, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at a conference in France last Friday.  It has some key announcements in there, so I’m reproducing the speech here for those interested in immediate payments and what Europe is doing. Keynote speech…