Payments

Feb 21, 2013

Don’t forget socialisation and gamification: tomorrow’s banking today

Building upon the discussions about personalisation and virtualisation, these are important. In fact, as I’ve mentioned before, personalised, virtualised in real-time on my mobile is PFM-squared (does any of that last sentence make any sense?). So then I was recently asked to address a conference with a mix of banks from all sectors, and to give…

Feb 19, 2013

If you didn’t think a payments revolution was taking place, think again

If you didn't think there was a payments revolution taking place, then think again as dealmaking websites like Groupon, Living Social and Huddlebuy have been pushing payments systems. It makes startling and notable change when you see consumer-based services pushing merchant and business based services at low cost. First there was my free deal for…

Feb 19, 2013

If you didn’t think a payments revolution was taking place, think again

Jan 23, 2013

Money is meaningless

I’ve blogged and presented about this subject many times before, so rather than repeating all that, here’s a summation with a new twist. Money is meaningless because we no longer deal in money. When we use the word money, most of us would envisage some brand new shiny, crisp notes coming out of a cash machine,…

Dec 6, 2012

Sexist Barclaycard ad alienates customers

I've worked for American firms during my main working life, just as we saw the rise of political correctness (PC) and the PC-police. It got to the stage where you couldn't even say "I like your new hairstyle", without falling foul of the PC-police (I know, as one of my male colleagues in Chicago got…

Dec 6, 2012

Sexist Barclaycard ad alienates customers

Nov 27, 2012

£3 million from a simple ATM skim

I was just surfing the BBC news for information about the new Governor of the Bank of England and found this as the #1 most viewed video clip today. The story is about a Romanian fraudster who admitted to stealing £3 million from a card-skimming scam. He couldn’t exactly deny it, as he was caught…

Nov 26, 2012

Are we on or off the rails

At SIBOS 2012, I led a session on the future of money along with Udayan Goyal … … and asked the basic question: will the future still be built on the banking foundation? I'm writing up the session again, as my original description left out a core conclusion about the need to adapt to the future…

Nov 23, 2012

Too fast to innovate, too slow to change

As mentioned yesterday, the regulator tries to keep up with the banks who try to keep up with customer, and I said that banks often innovate too slowly. There are many examples of this, but the one that I come back to regularly is Chip & PIN. Chip & PIN has been an enormous success,…

Nov 14, 2012

Virtual currencies will explode thanks to mobile games

The European Central Bank (ECB) has just issued a report on Virtual Currency Schemes, with case studies on Second Life and Bitcoin (both previously covered in depth here). In the report, the ECB calls Bitcoin “the most successful — and probably most controversial — virtual currency scheme to date.” The ECB goes on to say that the…