Payments

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…

FIS with WorldPay just produced an interesting report about the state of global payments. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: THE STATE OF PAYMENTS TODAY In 2023, the Global Payments Report continues its core mission to detail the contours of consumer payment behaviour at checkout both in-store and online, and to offer merchants and the broader payments industry key…

I was just in London for two major events. One, the launch of Leda Glyptis’s new book Bankers Like US … Great night with @LedaGlyptis and friends yesterday for the launch of “Bankers like US” pic.twitter.com/LG4OhgVhCn — Chris Skinner (@Chris_Skinner) February 2, 2023 … and second for the Card & Payments Awards. Here we go ……

Anyone who has attended a Sibos conference or similar payments meeting will have heard the buzz about ISO 20022 for years. The idea is that this will unite the global banking industry with a new standard for all payments messages. What is ISO 20022? ISO 20022 is best described as the future of financial messaging,…

Growing up hi-fi was High Fidelity, the best way to hear music. In 2022, HyFi is hybrid finance, the best way to use money. HyFi combines CeFi with DeFi. I don’t believe you can just have one. DeFi works for small things; CeFi is required for big things; HyFi allows both to work seamlessly. What…

I found a very interesting column on Forbes by Caitlin Long. She compares banking to the telco industry twenty-five years ago, and that the big telecoms firms all went bankrupt because they didn’t predict or see the impact of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). I really enjoyed the article but, at the same time, found it…

Do we just end up with another standard? This cartoon strip amused me … … shared by my friend Theo. In fact, I blogged a while ago [2016] about “Standards – which one do you want?” The thing is that standards strike at the heart as to why blockchain has not really worked yet [I also…

I spotted an update from a colleague the other day, questioning the future of the big card processing companies. For me, they are a duopoly. Processing more than three-quarters of world card payments, and terminals and paypoints everywhere online and offline, I cannot see Visa or MasterCard (MasterChip?) disappearing in the near-term. That leaves a…

What is the four-pillar model? It’s a system created years ago to allow plastic card systems to work. The system connects merchant to consumers via an acquiring bank and an issuing bank. Well, maybe it’s not that simple. Let’s let MasterCard explain it: What is interchange? Interchange is a small fee typically paid by acquirers (retailer’s…