Payments

Just before Christmas I heard of a new European payments initiative called PEPSI, short for Pan European Payment System Initiative. Nice acronym although I prefer Coca-Cola, the Co-ordinated Car Co-operative Association. Or something like that. Anyways, whichever Cola you prefer, this new initiative is interesting. Backed by over twenty mainly …

I have often written about how the developing world is leap-frogging the developed world. The reason is that the developing world had no infrastructure in place whilst the developed world implemented their infrastructure in the last century. The developed world has become a legacy world. The developing world is a …

I was going to write stuff about this but The Financial Stability Board did it for me. Here’s where the regulator will focus in 2020: The Financial Stability Board (FSB) published its work programme for 2020. The FSB’s work priorities for 2020 reflect the evolving nature of the global financial …

Really interesting interview here with Ana Botin, Executive Chair of Santander, on Bloomberg. It starts with talking about how Santander can make a difference on climate change with Ana claiming that the bank is voted the most sustainable bank in the world. But when the interviewer, Erik Schatzker, asks her …

Following on from the discussion of payments in the cloud, I was recently asked by Volante Technologies to consider what being a digital bank means for a commercial bank’s payments and treasury services and identified three areas of focus: moving payments to the cloud; fast-tracking real-time / instant payments adoption; …

I was recently asked by Volante Technologies to consider what being a digital bank means, specifically for a commercial bank and, even more specifically, the bank’s payments and treasury services. After all most of the focus on digital banking and digital payments has been in the retail sector, where consumers …

After yesterday’s article about how backward America is, in terms of payments, there’s a useful article talking about how they’re trying to rectify this. Bearing in mind that the big American banks are all spending $10 billion plus each on technology, they should be updating, and CB Insights latest installment looks …

When did you last write a check (cheque)? When did you last receive one? Although a valid payment mechanism in some countries, it has been phased out in many. Finland stopped using checks in 1993 and Poland in 2006. The Netherlands have taken it a step further. Having banned domestic …

A lot of discussion at the United Nations, where I’ve been all week (blogging about that next week), has raised the question of Libra, the Facebook digital currency. I’m avoiding calling it a cryptocurrency, as it’s more a stablecoin that is focused upon transactions, which is why it has Visa, …

I’ve blogged a few times about Facebook planning to launch a currency … Will Facebook become the world’s central bank? If Facebook launch a cryptocurrency, will US government shut it down? … and the fact that most regulators won’t like it. In fact, there are already questions being asked in …

In my presentations I regularly talk about legacy Europe and America and leapfrog countries from China to India to Kenya to Colombia. The reason the latter countries are leapfrogging Europe and America is that they didn’t have a large, ingrained existing infrastructure for payments and financial transactions in place until …

I recently started to worry that people might think I have some sort of arrangement with Ant Financial to publicly endorse them, as I’m such a fan-boy. I talk about what Alibaba, Ant Financial and Alipay is doing in every presentation, blog about them a lot and am thoroughly enraptured …

I’ve been finding it increasingly frustrating on my travels, thanks to one of my credit card companies. My travelling depends on two credit cards: a bank issued corporate MasterCard and American Express. The reason I carry these two is that the MasterCard works across Europe, where quite a few countries …

I’m writing more and more about Facebook launching its own cryptocurrency lately: Will Facebook become the world’s central bank? (March 2019) Will a global platform connect all of our money? (April 2019) This is because they are getting serious about payments and blockchain, after a variety of reports that they …

As I travel non-stop, I have one trusty little zip-bag in my travel case. It’s a zip-bag full of cables and converters, mainly to keep my phone fully charged all the time. Plug converters for America, Europe, UK and Australia, and cable converters between Apple and non-Apple products. As I …