Community

Are you sure that these characteristics cannot be digital?

We did this in 1983 by introducing a fee for cheque forms - disappeared overnight..

Would it not be better to move to electronic payments?

TELEUBF was basically a bank workstation placed on the enterprise premises - so yes real time access - using public networks. PC-banking for SMEs started in1982. It was also possible to enter transactions with phones - not only get balance information. But the PC obviously dominated - also for private customers who widely were allowed to use workplace computers for own banking. Important as homecomputer penetration was rather low and modems even fewer. This all lead to a world record in absolute number of payments that lasted into 2000s (Union Bank of Finland became pan-nordic Nordea Bank)

Union Bank of Finland launched corporate e-banking - branded TELEUBF in 1979

Good. We started home e-banking 1982 and Finland hade 20% of all households on netbanking when Internet arrived... 

Surely interesting aspects coming our way - supported by the standards and ecosystems. Was told that adding 1 digit to the EAN code would make every bottle of Coke an identifiable individual.. But it would of course be easy to use the coming real time VAT reporting (based on e-invoices and POS receipts) to have daily sales per EAN-code followed - also by region, type of outlet, type of buyer, type of payment method etc etc - and how it correlates with the weather, stock exchange, news flow, elections etc......

Banks should move much faster into the next levels of trustbusiness - a traditional service. And the public sector should encourage them to put the KYC+e-banking credentials at the service of society at large. Strong e-id needed in public sector - but it makes no sense to create separate tools for something needed seldom.

Why are people using cash in the first place? Causing a 50 billion euro cost to merchants in EU. Transparent pricing needed!

Since then further down rather steeply. Why on earth should you use cash - cause a 50 billion euro cost to merchants in EU (and thus to yourself and even those who do not use cash..). And then the cost of any number of criminal and grey economy activities..