Following our regular weekly interview, the Finanser talks this week with one of Europe’s fastest growing unicorns, Klarna, in conversation with co-founder and Deputy CEO Niklas Adalberth, To begin with, perhaps you can tell me how you and your colleagues came up with the idea of Klarna. Sure. When we started this company, the entire…
What happens when the cost of payments reaches zero, the speed of payments is instant, and everyone globally can make and take a payment, what happens then? I just had an interesting chat with someone and realised two things: one is that we’re talking about moving away from batch to real-time, and that’s where the…
In the spring of 2015, the Financial Services Club ran an online survey, in collaboration with Cognizant and VocaLink, about the nature and state of the world’s largest payment processing infrastructures and whether they are fit for purpose. The survey reviewed the areas influencing payments; the technologies that have the most impact; the ability of…
The real way to crack the onboarding and criminal activity is to create strong and secure digital identities. We are moving in that direction, but it’s a long slow process. For ages now, I’ve written about getting rid of passwords and improving authentication using mobile technologies: Why is KYC so difficult? AML prevention lies in…
When you talk non-stop about digital, it sometimes gives you a reality check when you actually live life in a physical world. The frustrations of crashed systems, products that don’t work, call centre operators who aren’t co-operative and check-in staff who can’t check-in. Equally, there are the moments of pure bliss such as the smell…
This is a blog from the Hotwire PR website, written by Camilla Ives. It summarises my good friend John Chaplin's Payments Innovation Jury Report report well. The report has been produced annually for the past four years and John will be presenting this in person to the Financial Services Club in England (June) and Poland…
Banks are being hacked all the time. According to various statistics, banks get over a million cyberattacks a year, and protecting the bank from breach is getting harder and harder. This was well illustrated by the Kapersky report of a cybercrime group in February gaining access to over $1 billion in two years by targeting over…
So I blast the corporate banking world for being slow to change and believing their customers won’t change … and maybe they’re right. After chairing a panel of large corporates including Jaeger, Virgin Media, Illy and Hotel Booker BV, the view seemed to be that banks were doing a good enough job and that corporates…
At last week’s Payments International conference, Dave Birch and I engaged in a fun Oxford style debate entitled: This House Believes That Banks Are Failing To Grasp The Mobile Opportunity. Unfortunately Dave got to propose the motion – we both said afterwards we could have argued either way – and, purely because a lot of…
