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Payments

Twitter’s Jack Dorsey reinvents US card payments

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…

When will they ban travellers cheques?

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.

Travellerschecks

Europe’s new regulatory agenda

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…

Doyle

Over half of UK’s internet users bank online

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…

Remittances and the need for financial inclusion

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%….

Who am I?

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…

Snow1

M-PESA reaches 8 million people and $3.37bn

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…

M-PESA

2010: what’s in store for the technology of banking?

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…

No wonder we’re getting rid of cheques

With the announcement that the cheque is ending its existence in 2018, I wonder whether Gordon Brown inspired this decision. This is because one of his cheques bounced way back in 1972, during his student days.     It was sold on eBay for £3,100 yesterday (double click to enlarge).   That's 1,000 times more…

Gordon Brown bounced cheque

3,238 days to the end of the cheque

With the news that the cheque will end its life as a valid payments instrument in the UK on 31st October 2018, it's worth reminding all that it's not just old people who use them: But that the main usage is with businesses, who want to keep cheques. Because they like them for cashflow management….

Cheques

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