Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

Payments

GSMA and EPC announce agreement on mobile payments

Following yesterday’s dialogue about the long tail of banking being mobile focused, the EPC and GSMA announced a cooperative agreement for mobile payments this week.  Here’s the press release: GSMA Press Release 2008 GSMA Teams Up With European Payments Council Alliance will accelerate deployment of mobile payment services 30th June 2008, London: The GSMA, the…

The Long Tail of Banking

Aneace Haddad has asked me to explain more about my idea of a Long Tail in Banking.   The Long Tail in banking would be a mass market of niche microgroups that incur no cost overheads to manage but, for each transaction, creates a small profit. As the mass of niche transactions build, the small…

The Long Tail of Banking

Aneace Haddad has asked me to explain more about my idea of a Long Tail in Banking.   The Long Tail in banking would be a mass market of niche microgroups that incur no cost overheads to manage but, for each transaction, creates a small profit. As the mass of niche transactions build, the small…

PayPal’s Tenth Anniversary

I wrote an indepth analysis eighteen months ago about PayPal’s 100 months birthday and now they’re celebrating their official tenth anniversary, so I thought I would add a small addendum. Although I say it’s a small addendum, it’s quite an interesting one. Basically, I was updating some old slides about PayPal and thought that I…

Fortress Europe’s Independence Day?

I attended a long discussion yesterday about High Value Payments (HVP). I wondered why we even bothered to discuss and delineate between Low Value Payments (LVP) and HVP these days. Surely, we should just talk about Real-Time Payments (RTP), near RTP (sub two hours) and D+n. Alternatively, urgent versus non-urgent with T+n, dependent upon your…

Who knows their IBAN and BIC?

A question came up in today’s EBA sessions for Joe Pawelczyk, Vice President for International Relations at CHIPS, the American Clearing House for over $2 trillion of wire payments each day. The question seemed quite simple: “Why doesn’t America use IBANs for their bank account numbers, as all of Europe has now standardised on this?”…

Who knows their IBAN and BIC?

A question came up in today’s EBA sessions for Joe Pawelczyk, Vice President for International Relations at CHIPS, the American Clearing House for over $2 trillion of wire payments each day. The question seemed quite simple: “Why doesn’t America use IBANs for their bank account numbers, as all of Europe has now standardised on this?”…

Prepaid – just another payment type?

I have been attending a conference on Prepaid this week, one of the largest of its kind with over 300 delegates all focused upon this burgeoning market. The fact so many are attending says something, and most of these attendees appear to be from organisations other than banks. Transit authorities, mobile telephones operators, governments, utilities,…

Europe lacks a Leader

I don’t write about politics, because I am not a political creature. However, I felt compelled to write about this subject after Europe’s soul-searching over its identity since the Irish threw out the EU Treaty. The fact that the Constitution and the Treaty are unwanted does not de-stabilise our banking efforts under the Payment Services…

An Oyster that’s a Diamond, London’s Contactless System

Intriguing discussions today about the Oyster Card in London. This is the contactless card operated by Transport for London (TfL) to allow everyone to travel across the London public transport system without using cash. It’s basically a prepaid contactless card, like the Octopus Card in Hong Kong or the New York Subway Card. Oyster was…