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Chris Brown

Chris Brown CTO at Trusek

Cryptocurrencies: where to from here?

Cryptocurrencies have shown the world a new way of paying for goods and transferring money using an international currency unconstrained by national boundaries and national politics. A new democratised, decentralised way of managing money. There are problems in paradise however. The current crop of cryptocurrencies are swiftly turning into an en...

Blockchain Observations

Chris Brown

Chris Brown CTO at Trusek

Who else will eat the banks' lunch?

An industry has built up due to the inability of banks to work together directly. PayPal ($70.7B) first came into existence to add a layer of ease and security to the card schemes because the card schemes don’t provide the banks the flexibility to provide it for themselves. At that stage PayPal was eating the crumbs from under the banks' table. B...

Fintech

Chris Brown

Chris Brown CTO at Trusek

Does PSD2 have to be complicated?

There has been a huge amount written about PSD2 recently and much of it appears to be, with the greatest respect, over complicating the issue. Very fundamentally, to provide for all of the requirements of PSD2, we have three transaction types: balance, transaction list / statement and payment. Obviously, since these requests are coming from co...

/payments Innovation in Financial Services

Chris Brown

Chris Brown CTO at Trusek

An upgrade for Credit Unions and Community Banks?

Credit unions have been a hot topic for me this week. I have had two completely independent conversations with people about them. On Tuesday night I met a chap from the US at an investor summit who mentioned he felt the US credit unions, although more numerous than the UK, were technologically challenged. The following day I met with a group, from...

/retail Innovation in Financial Services

Chris Brown

Chris Brown CTO at Trusek

Banking on a pre-paid card platform

In recent years there have been a significant number of new "neo-banks" or "challenger banks" launched with much hype, here in the UK. Many of these appear to have been brought to market quickly, on the back of a pre-paid card platform and are buying customers now with a plan to build a revenue model in the future. Whilst I a...

/startups Fintech innovation and startups

Chris Brown

Chris Brown CTO at Trusek

What will replace the card schemes?

There has been much talk recently about how card payments will replace cash altogether in the future. I have talked previously about my opinion that the card schemes (Visa, MasterCard, Amex etc) are past their sell-by date and we need an alternative. I have also discussed my vision of a future with a different type of payment network support

/payments Innovation in Financial Services

Chris Brown

Chris Brown CTO at Trusek

A new payments network... for a brave new world

As mentioned in my previous blog there is much that's wrong with the existing payment networks, but it is always easy to criticise what others have done and rather more difficult to provide a solution to a problem. The network I envisage is modelled on the internet itself, with no central hub. Let's have a look at some defining characteristics o...

/security /payments Innovation in Financial Services

Chris Brown

Chris Brown CTO at Trusek

The current payment networks are no longer fit for purpose.

“The current payment networks available to the financial institutions around the world are no longer fit for purpose.” I think that this is a statement that has been generally agreed by all those involved but let’s go through them just to be clear: As discussed in a previous blog, the card networks are expensive to join, expensive to transact on,...

/security /payments Innovation in Financial Services

Chris Brown

Chris Brown CTO at Trusek

Will cards disappear before cash?

In the early 2000s when the internet was still young, Visa, MasterCard and the other major payment card schemes had a choice. They could create a system that made using credit/debit cards on the internet safe, or they could rely on the unguessability of the card number. As we all know: they chose the latter. In 2004, with online fraud becoming a...

/security /payments Innovation in Financial Services

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