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…
Last month, I posted an update on the comparisons between Apple, Google and Samsung’s mobile wallets, so this month I thought it worth comparing their adverts. Let’s start with Apple Pay. The tagline is: If it’s not an iPhone, it’s not an iPhone. I guess the marketing guys spent an age coming up with that…
I just found some interesting research about how banks in Europe are reacting to the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2), and what other banks worldwide think about it. PSD2 is a work-in-progress European regulation that will impact financial institutions already operating within the scope of the first Payment Services Directive of 2009. PSD2 extends the…
I was sitting the other day thinking about the good old days. In the good old days, if something was big and challenging, banks would get together and create a co-operative to solve the problem. SWIFT, Visa and MasterCard were all bank created co-operatives. Admittedly, times have changed and now Visa and MasterCard are private…
