The United Payment Interface (UPI) launches commercially in India on Monday 18th, April, 2016. The first step was the launch of a national biometric identification system. This first step has met with apparent resounding success. Bloomberg So far, India’s attempt to assign every citizen a unique 12-digit number associated with a person’s unique iris, fingerprint or facial features, is succeeding—just last week, Aadhaar reached its milestone of registering 1 billion people. With more than 80 percent of Indians enrolled, it gives the payments system a solid base to build on. The Bloomberg article goes on to note that the UPI … Continue reading India launches ubiquitous mobile banking infrastructure

I have tried various blog posting apps for OSX with most being quite hopeless to date. Windows bog posting apps are streets ahead. I haven’t had time recently to research more. However today I came across this one which seems to address all the requirements, even though the interface is at best average. It does tick all the boxes in terms of formatting, images, and general typing with headings and the likes. Worth a look for OSX users. myWPEdit Continue reading Experimenting with myWPEdit

TD have rolled out the result of their partnership with Moven. The reference to a “first in Canadian Banking” is a bit of a stretch given spending analysis capabilities that BMO and RBC have, unless the ‘first’ refers to deployment as an app. It seems that it runs as a separate app to the regular banking app. Techvibes TD Bank today announced it has begun its roll-out of TD MySpend, a new real-time money management app – a first in Canadian digital banking. A companion to the TD app for iPhone or Android, TD MySpend makes it easier for customers … Continue reading “TD Bank Launches Real-time Money Management App” – Techvibes

Raymond Tomlinson, the godfather of email, died Saturday morning of a suspected heart attack. He was 74. Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/web-culture/email-pioneer-ray-tomlinson-<img data-position=”3″ style=”margin-top: 5px; margin-right: 5px; margin-bottom: 5px; max-height: none; max-width: 100%;” src=”tomlinson.png” data-mce-src=”tomlinson.png”dead-at-74-20160306-gnbspq.html#ixzz42Br4aL13 Continue reading Ray Tomlinson – inventor of email died today

SIBOS is an interesting meeting each year where the lemmings look for the cliff to race off to. I don’t say that with animosity but with reality where we have several thousand largely paid employees who are tired of the daily payment grind, and looking for clarity on whats next. So when the senior folks at banks start talking about identity as a service one has to yawn. I recall discussions and analysis about this potential service in 1998 in Chicago while I was at mbanx. The obvious analogy between the bank vault containing cash and a vault containing your … Continue reading SIBOS: What is Banks’ role in identity

Just in case you thought the world financial system was rational, then in fact you are correct. Rational thought for protection of the world financial system during the next crisis is to eliminate the problem caused by cash. Now this might seem an extreme view of the world, but lets not forget Andy Haldane of the Bank of England proposed elimination of cash just last month. How and Why Banks Will Seize Deposits During the Next Crisis The financial system is predominantly comprised of digital money. Actual physical Dollars bills and coins only amount to $1.36 trillion. This is only … Continue reading Why do we need cash?

Digital Finance conference in Toronto. Two panels today with very different perspectives and fascinating to observe: first panel was very focussed on the regulatory environment, and was very focussed on the problems that fintech has with regulators. There was a thread of unbanked and underserved. In general this panel struck me as close to lobbyists Sarah Gordon CFSI Carol Caruso Accion (funded by Gates Foundation) Grant Fondo – Goodwin Proctor (security / cybercrime) Jo Lang (ny) R3CV – crytocurrency, org with 9 global banks Sarah Martin, Moneythink – economic health of US people one at a time the next panel … Continue reading Digital Finance Toronto 2015 – some notes @dfi2015

@dgwbirch: Most notable difference between UK Unconference and Canadian one was lack of discussion around APIs, big part of London event #TTTU2015 Continue reading Bank as a platform – not in Canada apparently