Last week I chaired the inaugural Dot Finance Live conference in Nairobi, Kenya. It is Africa’s premier FinTech event, drawing people from all over the countries of sub-Sahara Africa. What struck me as I listened to lots of keynotes about mobile innovation and mobile financial inclusion, is that Africa is actually leading the world in…
I remember being involved in a business process re-engineering project for an insurance firm some years ago. We looked at how the underwriting process worked on complex insurance risks and discovered that in the middle of the process, the documentation would move to the overseas desk. It would sit there for a day or two,…
The Cards & Payments Awards 2016 took place the other day, so I thought I’d pick out the three Awards that interest me the most: Best Technology Initiative; Best Initiative in Mobile Payments; and Best Industry Innovation. BEST TECHNOLOGY INITIATIVE Winner: Bottomline Technologies Bottomline’s Agency Services is a relatively new solution, and the interest it…
Looking back on 2015, it’s obvious that blockchain was the big focus as mentioned last week. There were other things though, particularly the increasingly intriguing wallet wars. Mobile wallet wars have been bubbling for a while, with stagnant attempts to achieve something from the likes of O2 and Orange. Let the mobile wallet wars begin,…
I love the idea of money without government but, having sat through a regulatory discussion of correspondent banking, I think this hope is possibly false placed. However, for my banking fraternity, I think they’ll be very interested in two reports recently produced on correspondent banking by the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) for…
The PSD2 is here. For those who don't know what that is, it's the European update to the Payment Services Directive (PSD) of December 2007. The original PSD aimed to harmonise the European payments markets and make the Eurozone behave as a Single Market. It achieved some of those objectives, but the update goes much further…
Being #SIBOS week, there’s a rush of new reports to push out. McKinsey’s Global Payments Report and Cap Gemini’s World Payments Report being the two big one I noticed this week. A quick review of each. McKinsey’s report summary opens with the following: Global payments revenues have been growing at rates in excess of expectations….
We had an interesting dinner this week talking about customer onboarding. The focus was on counterparty banks and corporate account opening processes, and the ongoing challenges therein. In a nutshell, due to the documentary and regulatory requirements for proof of identity and trust, the account opening process is the worst part of banking and can…
