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Ketharaman Swaminathan

Founder and CEO
GTM360 Marketing Solutions
Member since
17 Apr 2009
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Pune
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Followed by John Sims, Martha Boyle and 5 others you follow
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Ketharaman's comments

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Why Square Wallet failed, and why Coin card is next...

When IBM sold off its PC business, it didn't mean that PCs were dead. The fact that Lenovo took it over and has turned it into a profit machine doesn't mean that PCs are thriving. IMO, success or failure of an individual brand (iPod, Amazon) does not reflect the fundamental validity or otherwise of the generic product (MP3 player) or business model (online). It means largely that the said company did a great or lousy job.

I thought you'd unequivocally written off swipe when you'd written, "So does this mean there's life left in cards? Not a chance." Many years later, your stats seem to imply that contactless accounts for merely 1% of card transactions. To me, that suggests that swipe is very much alive and kicking. 

If the payment itself is irrelevant, the genre "mobile payment" should become defunct as well - nothing invisible deserves a whole product category named after it. The spotlight should shift to "mobile loyalty", "mobile engagement", etc., if those are the only things that really matter. The same way it's called "smart meter", not "smart electricity". Starbucks and Uber are invalid lighthouses for mobile payments. 

17 May 2014 13:01 Read comment

Brewin Dolphins takes £32m hit on IT implementation U-turn

First CoOp-Infosys, now Brewin-Figaro. Unless tech vendors do something fast, the value proposition of their legacy transformation offerings will erode rapidly.

6 Reasons Why Banks Can't Transform Legacy Applications  

17 May 2014 12:12 Read comment

Dongle based Mobile PoS is a waste of investment

I'm sorry but it appears that there's a bigtime mixup between mPOS and mWallet here. These are two different products, with entirely different pains, target audiences and value propositions.

I partially agree with your views about mWallet and have written about the subject on several occasions myself e.g. Mobile Wallets: Fix What's Broken - And It Ain't Payments. However, mPOS, which is the topic of this post, solves a pain I've already mentioned. SQUARE *has not* shut down this product. 

SQUARE has shut down only its Wallet product. 

 

15 May 2014 09:38 Read comment

Exploiting the value of extended remittance information

Agreed. Your figure of 18 characters resonates totally with my personal experience. As I'd highlighted in my post titled How Usability Can Increase Adoption of Internet Banking on my personal blog, I wanted to enter "MCS MERIDIAN CLIENT ACCOUNT" in the payee field of the payment instruction but my bank - a Top 5 UK Bank - would only permit a narration as long as "MCS MERIDIAN CLTAC" which is exactly 18 characters. However, another Top 10 UK Bank was able to accept my full narration. Maybe some banks did implement a workaround several - if not 20 - years ago, considering my post is from 2008.

14 May 2014 19:45 Read comment

Why Square Wallet failed, and why Coin card is next...

I think it's a generational thing. My GenY nephew hits a button on his Webmail, selects a file from his hard disk, stares at the screen for the next 5-10 minutes that it takes to finish attaching a large file to his email, before he can hit the Send button. Having been initiated into email via a desktop client like Outlook - where I simply copy-paste the file and hit the Send button and move on - I find the Webmail procedure to be excruciatingly painful.

In the same way, my nephew's set will find it perfectly natural to fire up a mobile wallet app, wait for several seconds / minutes to locate the store, all for the pleasure of using a mobile phone to make a payment unlike me who'd find it much easier to whip out my wallet and use my plastic card.

Personally, SQUARE Wallet should've targeted the 18-25 years segment. It failed because its promo videos featured people who looked to be in their late 20s or early 30s.

Talking about Coin, an overwhelming majority of readers who took the survey on my blog post said they'd pay not more than US$ 10 for it. If the company sticks to its $50 / 100 price, I agree that Coin's going to be DOA.

14 May 2014 19:25 Read comment

Evolution to revolution: five levels of the paperless office

It's interesting to know that something can languish for almost 40 years because people didn't know where to start. Many of the technologies underpinning these five maturity levels have been around for 10-20-30-40 years, if not more. They're suddenly going to make a big difference now because? Well, they're not going to make any difference because paperless is a fundamentally flawed concept, as I'd highlighted in my post How Suitable Is Email For Delivering Bills And Statements?

14 May 2014 19:07 Read comment

Judge orders RBS to stop using loan software

According to Michael Lewis' Flash Boys, Goldman Sachs regularly took over open source software, made changes to it but failed to submit it back to the open source community. Now, we hear this about RBS. Even counting only the software that they pay for, banking is one of the biggest consumers for IT. If we add the rest of the software they use, they might easily top the list. 

13 May 2014 16:50 Read comment

Visa and MasterCard face heavy price for Russian business

@PaulL: I don't know the exact figures but even V/MC debit interchange rate has been low in India - our regulator-cum-central bank RBI seems to have done a a Dodd-Frank-Durbin on the industry long ago! That said, RuPay's sponsor, NPCI, is a not-for-profit government corporation, so we can never underestimate its pricing power. Given that RuPay has placed overseas acceptance on its own roadmap, it'd appear that co-branding with V/MC is either not permitted or not desired or both, but I'm not sure.

13 May 2014 16:38 Read comment

Visa and MasterCard face heavy price for Russian business

@PaulL: TY for sharing this article. Since RuPay has been around for over two years in India, I never got the "launch" part of the news when I read it a few days ago. Not one of my banks has approached me to replace / supplement my existing V/MC debit-cum-ATM cards with a RuPay card. There's still no credit card on RuPay. V/MC don't need to maintain a security deposit to continue to operate in India. On the ground, the "taking on global players" part of the article sounds hollow and is a far cry from what's happening with V/MC in Russia. 

13 May 2014 15:58 Read comment

Dongle based Mobile PoS is a waste of investment

From what I understand of latest developments in India, nonbanks can become members of mobile payment network - and even offer CI-CO feature at their agents' stores - as long as they obtain an MTO license from RBI. As a merchant, should I be bothered that SQUARE needs merchant aggregation, whatever that might mean in this context?

13 May 2014 09:27 Read comment

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