Latest opinions that Bo Harald has shared on Finextra

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Bo Harald

Chairman/Founding member, board member

Trust Infra for Real Time Economy Prgrm & MyData,

Member since

04 Nov 2008

Location

Helsinki Region

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Bo's opinions

54 billions in Germany - too much or not enough?

Deutsche Bank Research report came out with this cost saving figure - referring to research at Hanover University. Is it too much - or not enough? The answer is yes... 1. If you only think about cost savings achieved with dematerialization of paper (30 billion invoices and envelopes on EU level a year..) and saving stamps the estimate looks far t...

22 August 2009 /payments Innovation in Financial Services

Innovation - automating accounting for 20m enterprises..

The EC drive to reduce administrative costs by 25% in SMEs by 2012 is surely worth all support - especially as SMEs represent 63% of turnover. But it is not possible to achieve this goal without moving resolutely into the accounting area - reporting to autorities can be streamlined with the same tools. We now see a quite clear road to how this - a...

15 August 2009 /payments Innovation in Financial Services

Web squared - what does it mean for banking?

Interesting paper by Tim O'Reilly and John Batelle titled web squared. Starts out by describing how the Web 2.0 "network as a platform" enables applications that get better the more people use them with network effects acquiring users - then learning from them and building on their contributions. Web 2.0 is all about "harnessing co...

11 August 2009 /retail Innovation in Financial Services

It works in practise - BUT - does it work in theory?

This was the famous statement - allegedly by Chrusjtjov viewing a combined harvester demo at a sovhos. It came to my mind when reading the often so eminent Economist - now the "Modern Economy Theory" July 18th article. Without going into any interesting detail on this or on the rebutting views by Robert Lucas (Aug 6th) I think that we ha...

09 August 2009 /retail /wholesale

Dream scenario for VAT auditing

Making life easier and work more productive for SMEs in EU is a central goal for EU and most member states. More productive SMEs means more productive large enterprises and lower cost for the public sector (equals lower tax pressure and thus again better productivity and competitive position - less inclination towards protectionism). Now there is ...

04 August 2009 /payments Innovation in Financial Services

54 Billion reasons in Germany

From Deutsche Bank report: “the bulk of the companies [SMEs in Germany] squander the sizeable efficiency gains that come with the introduction of digital invoices. According to estimates by researchers at the University of Hannover, the German economy offers total cost-savings potential of around EUR 54 bn, mainly in more efficient processes, i.e....

31 July 2009 /payments Transaction Banking

Global attention for e-invoicing

Potentially useful repository in Business Week.The Real Time Economy Community site is still second to none - especially as we are in the next phase moving to automated real time accounting - starting from SMEs.

22 July 2009 /payments

Co-regulation time

I wrote this blog post back in 2007 and keep coming back to the theme rather often. As said there - business should morally embrace the need for regulation - it cannot be avoided - be it the environment, health business, financial engineering etc.Resisting it is a sure way for making it worse - joining forces with the democratic institutions give...

22 July 2009 /retail

Paying for paper

The migration from the old habit of de-electronizing invoices by printing them on paper - and thereby loosing much of the valuable information - and causing a lot of cost for re-electronizing what is left of it - is gathering speed in many ways. Some examples: - invoice receivers both nationally and multinationally are setting deadlines for paper o...

22 July 2009 /payments

Banking is easy..

You just accept deposits and make loans with high margins. If you are a start-up bank you just pay more for the deposits and then place the money in high-earning but still quite secure loans and interesting new papers some call hybrids. If you think this is risky you just place the money in a good number of papers - all will not go bankrupt - at l

12 July 2009 /payments /retail

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