Surprise! We spent a lot of the past month thinking about banks. March confronted us with stumbling blocks for fintechs and their sponsor banks, a bank-led battle for the checkout page, and a clearer view of the path forward for U.S. fast payments. Let’s dive into...
On Monday a few weeks back, a member of a client’s executive team gave me a call: “We really need to speed up the project to find another bank sponsor.” That was followed by a call from another client later that day: “We’ve been thinking about what it would take to...
Contrary to popular belief, the millennial generation is not lazy, entitled or narcissistic. They are a robust group of entrepreneurial, socially astute and media savvy consumers. They make discerning decisions about their money and are thoughtful about the...
Photo: Scott Loftesness A few weeks ago I joined my client Raj Jain, CEO of RS Software, for my third visit to India. RS Software is headquartered in Kolkata which was our first stop for the annual general meeting of shareholders. After that, we visited...
I'm back from two days at Consensus 2016 in NYC, and reporting as promised into my investigation of the Five Big Questions. 1. Bitcoin technology: will the problems (versions, processing time, scalability) be resolved? Yes. My belief that we are all writing this...
I'm headed to New York next week for the CoinDesk Consensus conference..."Making Blockchain Real". I'm going because I'm trying to get my head around some big questions. I normally have a sense, even with new things, of the path forward. Not in this case! Here are...
Imagine a country where less than 10% of the adult population has a bank account and only about half of those account holders have a debit card. Credit cards are virtually non-existent. There are only a couple dozen banks in the whole country. Cash truly is king....
I’m just back from Boston and the marathon known as Sibos 2014. In a post earlier this week, I shared a couple of observations from the show floor and the conference sessions. Now that the conference has closed, I’m thinking about the themes that spoke to me. And,...
Time is a vacuum at Sibos. It’s a great time to catch up with old friends and meet new colleagues. The exhibition floor is overwhelming, even now after banks have scaled back their presence at events like these. There is a plethora of panels on a broad range of...
It turns out you don’t have to be unbanked to like M-Pesa I had the opportunity earlier this month to visit the mecca of mobile payments, which --with all due respect to the recent accomplishments in Cupertino -- remains Nairobi, Kenya. The “Kenyan miracle” in...
