Payments

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 by their success. However, I…

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 do not accept American Express;…

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 will launch their own stablecoin,…

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 was looking at my little…

It was Earth Day on Monday, and a national holiday in many nations as they observed what Christians call Easter. Whilst Sri Lankans mourned the fatal losses on the Easter Sunday church gatherings, many observed the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. One of the leading lights of the modern environmental…

When I talk about FinTech, I often reflect on the first time I encountered what I would, today, call a truly FinTech firm. It was on March 30, 2005, and a newly formed firm presented at the Financial Services Club an idea. The idea was to connect people with money to people who needed money…

I used to blog about blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) almost once a week … four years ago. Today, I hardly blog about it at all. I guess it just shows what’s top of mind and what’s not at any time in FinTech and, right now, blockchain is not top of mind. In fact,…

I was about to write a really nice piece about Apple’s announcement of the launch of a new credit card, in partnership with Goldman Sachs, when Brian Roemmele beat me to it. Who is Brian Roemmele you ask? And if you are asking that … WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? Brian is a great speaker and prolific…

I got a large number of pings over the weekend to read and comment on an article on Medium by Lance Ng headlined: Facebook Plans to Become World’s Biggest Central Bank? It is a conjectured article that takes the story from The New York Times discussing Facebook creating its own cryptocurrency (Facebook and Telegram Are…

I often reflect on how quickly China is moving towards being cashless, as are parts of Africa and much of India. I then realised that it is a strong mix of simple infrastructure and strong incentive. In the case of M-PESA in Kenya, there was no method of making payments from city to village, except…