Payments

I’ve just been travelling Asia and went on a trip where the entrance to the first attraction – the batcave! – was two ringgits. That’s Malaysian currency and the equivalent of around half a dollar. As per usual these days, I have no cash and this was the first and only time in my one…

It’s coming. It’s been talked about for years. It’s finally here. Tokens. Physical and digital assets are being tokenized. In fact, maybe your DNA has been tokenized. Soon, everything will be tokenized. We talked about this years ago, but it’s notable that VISA, SWIFT, BNY Mellon and JP Morgan are now tokenizing. In a number…

In June, the EU put forward proposals for a new Payment Services Directive, PSD3. Having been involved in these developments since their inception in the 2000s, I was intrigued to read the text of PSD3, particularly as the main point bankers made about PSD2 is that they were forced to open up to Third Party…

We’ve talked for years about the need for micropayments. I can remember in the 1990s that the pay-per-view model demanded a payment for a single piece of information. Why should I subscribe for $30 a month to a website where one article has become relevant? Surely, I could pay $0.50 cents to read that one…

Thinking about money being inside my head, it already is in many ways. When I go around paying for things, I’m not focused upon my balances but on living my life. In the back of my head is that awareness that debits are going down and credits up, but the actual numbers are generic and…

Building on yesterday’s idea of the future world, where our brains are connected 24*7 in real-time to the network, what would that mean for financial services? Well, I’ve blogged about this a few times already: Invisible banking is the place to be Nobody wants embedded finance Specifically, if we think of money as part of…

I was thinking about embedded, intelligent finance and imagining the future. There are many scenarios, but one that I kept returning to is when you have infi inside (intelligent finance inside). A chip in your brain, and you can run your life on automatic. It may seem phantasmagorical but there are several examples of where…

Apple rules the world. Assailed by Google/Alphabet, Facebook/Meta, Samsung and more, Apple has sustained an incredible trajectory to become a three-trillion-dollar company. Apple is now worth more than the entire FTSE100 list of companies … In terms of competitors, only Microsoft comes close which, some say, is mainly due to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but Apple’s dominance is…

I’ve been writing about the war on cash for years. It’s a constant theme that comes up at conferences like SIBOS, and the first time I think I heard the phrase was a Visa presentation back in the 2000s. Back in 2012, I wrote about a Pew report that surveyed a range of experts about mobile…

There have been lots of write-ups about the launch of FedNow which went live last Thursday. FedNow is a real-time payments service for American banks, and gives them 24*7 real-time money transfers throughout its interbank system. Woo-hoo! As Stephany Kirkpatrick, Founder and CEO of Orum, explains on Quora: FedNow is an upcoming instant payment platform…