I mentioned a dinner which I chaired about remittances the other day, and the firm that organised the dinner sent me a white paper as a follow-up. As a taster, read the previous blog entry or this paragraph gives a good indication of the content: "Remittances are no longer solely about supporting people in the…
Interesting article on the guide to all things Europe today, Euractiv, about the Payment Services Directive. The Directive “has been transposed in all but 11 of the 31 EU/EEA countries”. Hmmm … that would be Cyprus, Estonia, Italy and Latvia (Jan); Norway (Feb); Belgium, Greece, Spain, Finland, Malta and Poland (Mar); whilst Sweden is last…
Everyone's getting real excited about Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, and his new payments application for the iPhone called Square. If you haven't seen it, here it is: In a lengthy interview with Pymnts.com, Dorsey says: "We can provide a lot of things that I think have been missing in payments – specifically like…
Following the decision in the UK to phase out the paper cheque by 2018, here's a graph of travellers cheques usage as published by the Federal Reserve via Paul Kedrowsky (double click to enlarge): I wonder when these will be outlawed? The Financial Services Club is sponsored by: For details of sponsorship email us.
We had a fascinating and packed meeting at the Financial Services Club this week with David Doyle, EU Policy Advisor, discussing the challenges of the new Barosso European Parliament and their legislative drive in financial services. David is a regular visitor to the Financial Services Club, and runs our European Financial Regulatory Advisory Group. In…
As if to support my contention that a NEW bank should focus upon offering the world's best remote channel banking, the Payments Council released the following press release today: "It is just 12 years since internet banking began, but its popularity has grown so much that, in the first half of 2009, 22 million adults…
I chaired a dinner last night on remittances and it was pretty interesting. The term ‘remittances’ is generally used to refer to foreign workers sending money home and represents major GDP for many countries. For example, Tonga’s remittances represent 40% of the country’s GDP, Samoa’s is 25%, Jamaica’s is over 20% and the Philippines 10%….
I’m sitting in the house. It’s snowing. Look. This is big news. We don't get snow in Britain anymore. Global warming saw to that. So when it's snowing, it's major news headlines. Non-stop BBC reports saying: "it's snowing". And so it's snowing, and Britain has stopped. Literally. Everything has closed down. We couldn't even get…
Just checked out Safaricom's results presentation for the first half-year 2009-2010, and found some interesting slides on M-PESA: Fascinating results … especially as Safaricom were not the instigators of M-PESA. At the start, they could not commit to a risky project of this nature with resources and so Vodafone brought in a…
After various predictions yesterday, including the return of Glass-Steagall and a Chinese bank buying an American or European one, today it’s the turn of technology. There are lots of questions about technology, such as: Will Google make us stupid? Will we live in the cloud or the desktop? Will social relations get better? Will the…
