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Ketharaman Swaminathan

Founder and CEO
GTM360 Marketing Solutions
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17 Apr 2009
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Ketharaman's comments

clear
Citi spends more on tech than all VC investment in US fintech

"Fincumbents" - i.e. suppliers of technology to financial services - who are the recipients of Citi's tech budget know that Citi and other traditional banks individually spend more on tech than all fintechs put together. It's no secret that many leading IT companies in the world earn maximum revenues from BFSI. For some of them, BFSI revenues exceed revenues from all other verticals put together.

04 Jun 2018 15:29 Read comment

UK digital challengers beating high street banks on customer satisfaction

Nonbank Financial Product Marketplace is par for the course e.g. MoneySupermarket, BankRate.com, etc. While the category has seen a lot of mortality - e.g. MoneyAisle, TransFS, Payments R Us - the basic concept looks sound. Wish I could say the same of Bank Financial Product Marketplace. I've never been too convinced that a bank that has its own checking account will also offer checking accounts from other FIs on its Financial Product Marketplace. Starling Bank's recent move to terminate its proposed partnership in payments with TransferWise racheted up my skepticism by a few notches. 

https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/30/starling-raising/

31 May 2018 11:36 Read comment

UK digital challengers beating high street banks on customer satisfaction

@FinextraMember:

People shop around even for clothes, gadgets, etc. I find it very hard to believe that they'd buy all their financial products blindly from their current account provider. 

While CX plays a role, the basic human instinct to "shop around" drive is the main reason why, as you say, "a small percentage of people have their mortgage and investments with their main bank".

Going by the numbers cited by you, Monzo does seem to be doing well with Current Account. But it's not a given that, if a Challenger Bank does a better job than an Incumbent Bank with Current Account, it will be able to do a similarly better job with a Financial Product Marketplace. Scaling up constraints arise from regulatory / compliance factors, as Simple's Founder CEO explains in this Slate interview.

30 May 2018 14:41 Read comment

Hyundai preps in-car payments

Why would you pay with your car wallet or mobile wallet rather than your plastic card? Why would you pay with your car wallet or mobile wallet or plastic card rather than cash? End of the day, just as Edmund Hillary/George Mallory reportedly said they climbed Mount Everest because "it's there", companies hope that there are enough EH/GM-like people out there who will buy their products because "it's there". 

30 May 2018 14:08 Read comment

Breaking the Monolith - A FinTech Game-Changer

A bank customer with mainframe core used to liken doing any changes on the monolith with "performing open heart surgery without anaesthesia".

29 May 2018 19:19 Read comment

UK digital challengers beating high street banks on customer satisfaction

"...55% say they believe the potential risks outweigh the potential benefits of open banking". So I thought when I wrote Open Banking Needs A Blockchain Boost.

On a side note, I don't find it hard to believe the results of this survey. The  raison d'ĂȘtre of Challenger Banks was to deliver better CX than Incumbent Banks. Assuming that they delivered on even 50% of their vision, it'd be easy for them to trump Incumbent Banks on CSAT. But, the real question is, how many surveyed people had their primary / sole accounts at a Challenger Bank?

Given that Challenger Banks offer only a fraction of the products of Incumbent Banks, their scoring better on CSAT reminds me of a line that was used as an example for a certain figure of speech I forget in my Wren & Martin high school grammar text book: "He had nothing to do and he did it well". Like I keep saying, it's not very hard to offer a seamless experience across all products when you offer only one-and-a-half products:)

29 May 2018 16:21 Read comment

London pushes contactless payments for busking

Soon after the de/remonetization of high value currency notes in India in 2016, there was a severe cash crunch. To tide over the crisis, the government urged people to switch to digital payments and gave the example of a homeless person who started started accepting donations via PayTM, the largest mobile wallet in India (and perhaps the world). I cringed at this and thought how about eliminating the scourge of homelessness in the first place. Looks like it's here to stay everywhere. I'll now cringe less. 

28 May 2018 19:38 Read comment

Tandem initiates 'Fraud Conversation' to relieve the hassle of blocked transactions

What kind of transactions is this PUSH notification for? Debit card, Credit card or A2A transfers?

24 May 2018 18:32 Read comment

Are banking chatbots hitting the trough of disillusionment?

I think the state of affairs of chatbot is also a reflection of the oft-forgotten fact that there's only so much banking an average customer wishes to do. Offering 3X channels is not going to magically increase the customer's banking transaction volumes by 3X. Another related comment is here.

23 May 2018 19:43 Read comment

OCBC Bank to push biometric POS to merchant customers

Oh it showed up almost 20 years ago. In what's considered to be one of the most egregious examples of burning through capital, PayByTouch shut down after taking $175M in VC funds in the early 2000s. It's extremely hard to make a non-deterministic authentication method like fingerprint work in near real time at scale in a queue-based environment like instore checkout. Let's see how this goes.

23 May 2018 19:27 Read comment

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Ketharaman writes about

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