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Pune

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2009

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Security Payments Regulation & Compliance People Retail banking Wholesale banking Cloud DevOps Start ups Cryptocurrency Markets Financial Crime Covid-19 Predictions

Ketharaman's blog archive

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Ketharaman Swaminathan

Founder and CEO at GTM360 Marketing Solutions

Message Posts: 148 Comments: 4,529

Bio As Founder and CEO, S. Ketharaman provides overall direction and leadership toward setting and achievement of GTM360's goals and objectives. Career History S. Ketharaman has a unique combination of Information Technology products and services experience resulting from his professional career spanning over two decades at leading technology companies like Fujitsu, Oracle, Ramco and Wipro. More at http://www.linkedin.com/in/sketharaman

Blogs

My Two Cents On PayTM Kerfuffle

08 Feb 2024

PayTM is the first digital payment product I've used at scale in India. When RBI enforced the two factor authentication mandate for online payments, bill payments became a major PITA. By requiring users to fill credit card number, expiration date, and half a dozen fields, Reg 2FA caused tremendous friction. After they received the OTP, entered it ...

Why ChatGPT Won't Kill Coders

25 Jan 2024

In Will ChatGPT Kill Coders?, we examined many demand suppressors that threatened to kill coders' jobs. We also alluded to DEMAND STIMULANTS, which work as counterweights by boosting demand for coders. In this post, we will do a deep dive into Demand Stimulants. Comprising new computing paradigms and markets, demand stimulants not only arrest the ...

How AI Can Take Readability Of Bills And Statements To The Next Level

10 Jan 2024

In Bills And Statements Are Hard To Decipher, we noted that it was very hard to read bills and statements from banks, ecommerce companies, retailers and other industries. We took two examples and did a deep dive to understand the full extent of the indecipherability problem: Ecommerce Bill Bank Statement In this post, we will examine the root c...

Will ChatGPT Kill Coders?

05 Dec 2023

While building the new website of my company, I asked ChatGPT for code for the following responsive design elements: 3 images side by side Table with 2 rows, first row with 3 images, second row with 3 links 3 images side by side on one line and 3 links on the next line 3 images side by side with linked captions. ChatGPT responded back with code s...

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Ketharaman is Commenting on

The Future of Banking: Beyond Products, Towards Experiences

Since the dawn of online commerce in the mid-1990s, if not earlier, ecommerce commerce have always integrated credit card, eCheque, cash on delivery, and other payment modes into their websites and workflows. IMO the addition of BNPL now is nothing new and does not qualify as Embedded Finance. Not that banks ever claimed to provide end-to-end financial experiences but they at least sold a plethora of products that customers could pick and choose to achieve their financial goals. Fintechs came into existence to unbundle various products and thereby create disjointed financial experiences. They have flopped in their endeavor to thus inflict "death by thousand cuts" to banks. Their failure has only validated the traditional business model of banks to stick with products instead of getting into experiences. Furthermore, as Matt Levine highlighted on the back of the collapse of SVB and other regional banks in USA last year, "a bank with sleepy depositors would do well, a bank with antsy depositors would go bust". Two years after the end of ZIRP and rise of interest rates to 4-5%, the #1 bank in USA still offers only 0.01% interest. Therefore, I don't see banks ever promoting their customers' financial literacy. Given how various banking charges allegedly affect the financial health of their customers adversely, the best we can expect from banks is that they don't promote financial ILLITERACY.

21 h Reply Read article

Lloyds warns against fraudsters on Booking.com and Airbnb

Kudos to Lloyds Bank. If rogue regulators apply drunk under lamp post regulation and force banks to compensate victims of APP scam for no fault of banks, it's only natural that banks warn consumers that they risk getting scammed at various marketplaces / aggregators and, in the extreme case, even stop payments to such merchants. Anybody who thinks banks are spreading FUD, instead of creating awareness, should take over the liability of making refunds for APP scam from banks.

15 Apr 2024 Reply Read article

Lloyds Bank cuts risk dept headcount

Kudos to Lloyds Bank. I don't recall any other bank anywhere in the world taking such a public and explicit stance on what has always been well known in business: Mitigating risk does not pay the bills. Screening for risk is okay in loan approval, credit card authorization, and other transactional areas but too much risk sensitivity blocks strategic transformation. Most often, risk professionals lack the competence to analyze risk in the TO-BE transformed state in a rigorous manner, so they lean towards blocking the transformation as CYA strategy. Too much risk sensitivity is one big reason why banks have lagged fintechs in product and UX. I'm not saying banks should mimic fintechs' products and UX but, if that's what they want to do, downsizing risk department headcount is the way to go.

11 Apr 2024 Reply Read article

Russia targets Apple over banking apps

As soon as Russia invaded Ukraine, I recall reading that Google canceled Google Pay in Russia, thus leaving many Moscow Metro commuters stranded without a key payment method. Going by that, I'd assumed that the US sanctions announced immediately after the invasion covered not only SWIFT but also Russian (and American) apps on Apple AppStore and Google Play Store. Ergo, I'm surprised that this took so long.

08 Apr 2024 Reply Read article