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Any Fintech Mafia Carousel Shill member who tells you that your money is safe in an uninsured Neobank because it puts your money in an insured Sponsor Bank is either clueless, or lying, or both: As the Synapse - Evolve fracas in USA is adequate testimony, if neobank fails, insurance does not pay and there's no guarantee that the sponsor bank will recognize you if you approach it directly. Even if bank goes bust, whether you get your money back or not from insurance depends on how the neobank has ledgered its FBO account with the bank. Either you can learn all about FBO and bankruptcy proceedings or you can put your money in an insured bank directly. The choice is yours.

If credit card has chargeback / fraud protection at 2-3% MDR, it makes sense to extend similar benefits for BNPL at 3-6% MDR. However, if BNPL must have the same FICO score / creditworthiness bar as credit card, that'd drastically undermine its basic positioning as sorta ultra subprime loan and TAM therefrom. 

All my life, I've heard that companies who don't provide value to customers, increase prices arbitrarily etc. will perish. Visa / MasterCard were not a duoply at birth. The accusations made against them have been made for as long as I can remember. It beats me how these card networks not only survived but thrived when they were not a duopoly. I can think of only only one explanation for this disconnect: Visa / MasterCard continue to provide unrivaled price-performance despite being challenged by alternative payments. To hide their incompetence, competitors are using duopoly as a smokescreen and, knowing which side of the toast is buttered, merchants are playing along (or vice versa). 

There were tons of established, reliable tech vendors in the era when the phrase "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" was coined. From what I know, the backstory for this phrase is not tech chops but integrity, which was unique to IBM. 

IBM never bribed customers to win deals, unlike most of its competitors. Tech projects fail for a lot of reasons such as change management challenges, poor data quality, and so on, for which the customer company is to blame – not CIO or tech vendor. When customer bought from somebody other than IBM and the project failed, aspersion would be cast immediately on the CIO’s integrity, it would be taken for granted that the CIO took a bribe, and s/he would be fired without any due process – such as post-mortem / inquest – to investigate into other reasons for project failure. Whereas, when customer bought from IBM and the project failed, corruption was completely ruled out, CIO got the benefit of a “fair trial”, inevitably other reasons would be found for project failure that were unrelated to the CIO, and CIO got to keep his or her job.

Shows that consumers believe it's "better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it" when it comes to gu** - er bank branches. As I've said many times before, there are 18 banks with branches in my neighborhood, if I want to open a new account, I'll select one of those 18, even if I never plan to visit its branch. 

More on Alberta - Shell Carbon Credit Financial Engineering here. 

I've been exploring a "green solution" for cooling at my apartment based on Solar AC. I haven't found any core engineering solutions for 15+ years. Whereas I can set up "Green AC" overnight by resorting to financial engineering.

IME most green projects are green by financial engineering rather than operations e.g. chopping 1000 trees on the path of new metro and committing to plant 1000 trees somewhere else; driving an EV to avoid polluting pollute roads and producing the electricity required to charge the batteries by burning fossil fuels at a power plant elsewhere; buying carbon credits to offset carbon emission caused by AI datacenters instead of running the AI datacenters natively on renewable energy.

No telltale signs required! Whenever in doubt, bankers can assume that green projects involve financial engineering and adopt Financial Engineering best practices for Green Loan Risk Management!! 

This might cross a line but Benefits Fraud has been an intractable problem in UK for far too long for govt to continue to rely on traditional measures like ads on buses and bus shelters.

Having sold computers and software to Wall St and Dalal St for 35 years, I'd like to think that I've a reasonable understanding of how banks work. Going by my tribal wisdom, I'm betting that Green Loan will adopt Financial Engineering best practices before Green Loan Risk Management will scale new heights!!!

It's increasingly becoming apparent that many "green projects" are green by financial engineering rather than by operation. With scams like Alberta-Shell-BOGO Carbon Credits coming to light, I'm guessing that risk management of green loans will scale new heights.