I agree with the key role played by testing when all is well. I recall an incident when thousands of high value payment messages ended up in repair queue since the bank hadn't tested its new system for 11 character BIC. The bank was about to miss cutoff, all hell broke loose, and the regulator inquired if the bank faced a liquidity crisis, which is why it would miss its commitments worth hundreds of billions.
But in the current times, hypothetically, a bank could carry out zero testing, let its apps fail, block withdrawals, thus prevent a bank run. In a perverse sense, lack of testing would save the bank's bacon.
As you can see from my comments below In the Blink of an Eye: How the Digital Age Intensifies the Risk of Bank Runs, I'll really not be surprised if my hypothesis comes true in the forseeable future.
13 Jun 2023 13:28 Read comment
Zillions of founders with sizeable stake in their company are also its CEOs. While conflicts of interest between the two roles are inevitable, somehow they resolve them and move on.
Maybe I'm missing something but this reminds me of Steve Jobs' ouster as CEO of Apple back in the day.
12 Jun 2023 09:03 Read comment
@DavidGyori: Most probably, Visa + MasterCard would have agreed to invest big money to do free pilots etc. iDEAL may not have. When I was in London, Oyster Card supported prepaid and Visa / MasterCard modes. Does it support realtime PULL from FPS now?
09 Jun 2023 12:16 Read comment
I was amazed at the seamless connectivity across different modes of public transport in different cities of Germany. I could buy a single ticket for the full journey from my home in Frankfurt to my customer's office in Munich, a trip that straddled three companies operating a sum total of one long distance train, one U-Bahn, one S-Bahn and two tram connections. But, the way the ticketing system operated, I had to do some guesswork about zones and estimations of fares, which could go wrong.
I was then very impressed with tap-in-tap-out Oyster Card, which did the fare calculation by itself. But it was not useful beyond TfL public transport.
Assuming it's based on the Oyster Card paradigm, the Dutch ticketing system takes public transport payments to the next level.
Kudos to the folks who have made it possible.
09 Jun 2023 12:14 Read comment
PSA: Not sure why the OP missed out such a big point but none of these alternative products enjoy deposit insurance, which is a major advantage of bank savings account. Deposit insurance currently stands at $250K, £80K and ₹500,000 per person per bank in USA, UK and India respectively.
08 Jun 2023 12:33 Read comment
It won't be hard for banks to hide behind this proposed rule and delay payments and go back to the good old days of at least T+1 to earn float income. (If it were the USA, some banks might even use it to prevent bank runs.)
I can bet that this rule will never come into force in its present form by 2024. Instead, what will come into effect is my Three Strike Rule To Eliminate Cybercrime in some form or the other.
08 Jun 2023 12:24 Read comment
Sorry but I predict exactly the opposite effect of funding winter. Back in the days of ZIRP, fintechs got truckloads of funding and could run on losses for a long time so were able to eliminate overdraft protection and other fees that customers hated about traditional banks.
With funding cratering, fintechs will need to make revenues and profits from their core operations. While they can build more frictionless workflows to attract more customers, they probably need to do what banks have been doing all along to monetize those customers. That's not something that customers are going to love.
To cite a personal example, a leading mobile wallet supported free-of-cost credit card topup for 10+ years whereas, since the middle of last year, it has started slapping a 2% surcharge for the same transaction. Obviously, as a consumer, I'm not thrilled about this fees and I've jettisioned this product.
Hail VC Subsidy.
07 Jun 2023 11:21 Read comment
I'm amazed how SEC approved the public listing of CoinBase a few years ago when it knew that CoinBase's business model was illegal. If it's a question of jurisdiction, one would expect some other US govt agency to vet the legality of a business before it's allowed to sell shares to the man on the street.
Learning that other companies in illegal businesses like cannabis, gaming and rideshare were allowed to go public in USA only increases my wonderment.
07 Jun 2023 11:05 Read comment
Without regulatory mandate, Open Finance in USA garnered 80M users in five years. With regulatory mandate and huge amount of buzz, Open Banking in EU hasn't reached a fraction of that number. No end game is fine but is there a start game?
Open Banking: EU v. USA
07 Jun 2023 09:37 Read comment
This could be BIG! Hope this movie has a better ending than other blockchain-based settlement systems that somehow fizzled away e.g. ASX.
06 Jun 2023 10:20 Read comment
Manoj KheerbatFounder and CEO at Gropay
Walid HosniFounder and CEO at GXEGY
Eldad TamirFounder and CEO at FINQ
Roman EloshviliFounder and CEO at XData Group
Laxmi RamanathFounder and CEO at La Meer Inc.
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