The Lowdown on the SEPA Cards Standardisation Volume 2

SEPA card payments isn’t something that i have really gotten into so far, simply because the initial focus was achieving SEPA compliance and then funky fintech stuff started kicking off…! But last week, the European Payments Council issued a press release detailing the publication of a SEPA Cards Standardisation Volume (version 7.1). I must admit, it ...

10 Things I Hate About Cashless Payments 1

Over the weekend i had a really bad cold (!!) and ended up watching a bit of TV. One of the things i watched was the film 10 Things I Hate About You, a modern day adaptation of the Shakespeare comedy The Taming of the Shrew. It’s a pretty cool film and the title somehow ...

11 Insights From Anthony Jenkins Uber Moment Speech 1

Last Tuesday Anthony Jenkins, former group chief executive of Barclays, delivered a landmark speech – Approaching the “Uber Moment” in Financial Services – offering his opinion into the future of the industry. The Uber Moment speech is an incredibly powerful wake up call for incumbents, particularly banks, because here we have a former chief banker telling ...

The Top Payments News Stories in November, 2015 1

Payments news stories in November 2015 have been dominated by disruptive technologies and companies…. A continued focus of fintech, fintech investments, blockchain related collaboration, mobile payments initiatives and companies such as Square have been shaking things up this last month. This combined with some interesting payments reports and payments related surveys have culminated in a ...

8 Payments Companies Disrupting the Payments Industry 2

All the hip folk talk about fintech, and particularly payments companies because they are mixing things up and disrupting a world that has traditionally been ruled by large banks. Analysis provided by CB Insights highlights how investment in the fintech (financial technology) sector reached over $12 billion in 2014, and how companies in this sector ...

6 Regional Insights From The BCG Global Payments Report

During my recap of the Top Payments News Stories in October 2015, I mention the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report – Global Payments 2015: Listening to the Customer’s Voice. For me the regional insights were the most interesting part of the report and in this post I will share some of my notes. Please keep in ...

The Top Payments News Stories in October, 2015 1

This is a bumper edition of Payments News in October 2015. What an incredible month..! From a European perspective PSD2 was rubber-stamped, there were Payments Reports galore, countless fintech related stories, IPO’s broke records and there was Sibos. As i tracked through the month, i was amazed at the number of cyber-attacks too – worryingly ...

7 Things I Learnt about the Internet of Things this Weekend 1

Over the weekend I read the Deloitte report The Derivative Effect: How Financial Services can make IoT Technology Pay Off – The Internet of Things in the Financial Services Industry. As i was reading the report I realised that i didn’t know enough of the basics. So i started reading around and as I did so, ...

4 Disruptive Themes from the McKinsey Global Payments Report 4

There are plenty of reports out there about global payments, but there are a couple that are particularly noteworthy. One of them is the McKinsey offering – this year the McKinsey report is titled Global Payments 2015: A Healthy Industry Confronts Disruption. The Global Payments report hits upon all of the key happenings in the industry ...

The Top Payments News Stories in September, 2015

Payments news in September was dominated by three themes – cyber-security, mobile payments and fintech (of course!). Reports of cyber security breaches and the increasing adoption of fingerprint verification were recurring cyber security related stories. Mobile payments meanwhile continued to go from strength to strength, with initiatives from among others Samsung, Google and MasterCard. And ...