Dave points out here another point, without meaning to.  Australia (as a Brit I hate to say this) confounds logic by approaching payments matters in a most peculiar way, and this is just another example. Here’s an example, discussing what the poster calls the the most ill-considered banking product ever devised. Source: Digital Money Blog: The most ill-considered banking product ever devised? I doubt it.   Technorati tags: australia, payments Continue reading Digital Money Blog: The most ill-considered banking product ever devised?

 Dave discusses an Alliance & Leicester Commercial Banks Cash Survey published recently.  Boots have given up on cheque’s, which is significant.  In Canada cheque’s were killed off in most retailers a long time ago, but in the US are still accepted.  According to The Daily Telegraph, Boots is going to stop accepting cheque’s as they now account for only 2 in every 1,000 transactions. For our overseas readers, I should point out that Boots is a British institution, a high-street pharacy-cum-drugstore. I’m not sure, but I think the key statistic is that two-thirds of the UK population visit a branch … Continue reading Digital Money Blog: Death of the cheque

This new report picks up on directions led by the likes of Wells Fargo, that takes online banking right into the core space that was once dominated by Personal Finance Managers (PFM) such as Quicken, and Microsoft Money. This report looks at the more advanced personal finance features largely ignored by banks so far, including: categorization, sorting, reporting and long-term storage have largely been ignored by banks. Furthermore, integrated personal finance is less costly to provide than bill pay and may be an even more powerful a retention device. Source: Online Financial Innovations: Internet Strategies for Financial Institutions. PERSONAL FINANCE … Continue reading Online Banking Report: Why "My Spending Report" trumps free bill pay

For all the push to contactless cards, this release from Visa, noted by Aneace,  confirms the viability of small payments with no signature is not dependent on contactless. Last week, Visa reported that its volume on purchases less than $25 in small ticket segments totaled $27.3 billion in the first six months of the year, an increase of 17 percent over the same period in 2005. Those transactions were performed almost entirely using traditional magnetic stripe cards, not contactless cards. Source: Aneace’s Blog: Visa’s No Signature Required program is working … how will contactless compete? This service is apparently particularly relevant … Continue reading Aneace’s Blog: Visa’s No Signature Required program is working … how will contactless compete?

Good background on the mechanics of Interchange.  “The document examines the differential market impact of interchange fees in Australia, the UK and US. The results suggest that a theory applicable in one country may not be applicable in another and that similar interchange fee arrangements and regulations may well have different implications in different countries.” Source: “Finextra: research – Interchange: where theory and practice collide – Mozilla Firefox” tags: interchange Continue reading "Finextra: research – Interchange: where theory and practice collide"

Courtesy of Payments news, a new study on the international remittance market, with some surprising findings. Visa International, Latin America and Caribbean Region, has conducted a study that “revealed the banking potential of remittance recipients, as well as their interest in establishing more productive relationships with financial institutions. The remittance market reached US$52 billion in 2005, marking a 15 percent increase over the previous year.” The surprise is in the propensity of this group to want bank relationships; something that flies in the face of the traditional view, that as a group, their is a natural distrust of banks. 56 … Continue reading The Banking Potential of Remittance Recipients

Courtesy of Aneace, here is a paper on the evolution of the payment systems. Aneace’s Blog: The Merchant-Bank Struggle for Control of Payment Systems …… article written by attorney Adam Levitin, titled The Merchant-Bank Struggle for Control of Payment Systems, published in the September issue of the Journal of Financial Transformation.The article reviews the factors behind the struggle between merchants and banks, and explores the potential impact of new payments technologies and structural changes such as MasterCard’s IPO. The conclusion in the paper, is that two broad forces are at play that are changing the payment landscape. critical mass of … Continue reading The Merchant-Bank Struggle for Control of Payment Systems

The Wells philosophy is the epitome of customer centricity. Business 2.0: Bank different – Jun. 12, 2006 Wells Fargo CEO Dick Kovacevich tells Business 2.0 Magazine that there’s no such thing as bad customers – just companies that don’t work hard enough to turn them into good ones.…he argues, if a customer is truly unprofitable, that’s the company’s problem, not the customer’s. Their approach follows Aneace’s philosophy of treating each interaction, as an opportunity. Every transaction is an opportunity to engage a customer – both to satisfy a transactional need and also to sell him something. And the transaction  actually … Continue reading There’s no such thing as bad customers

JPMorgan Chase AG outline a payment vision. Finextra: comment – Payments 2016 Speaking at the first annual EBAday payments conference in Frankfurt in June, Mark Garvin chief administrative officer JPMorgan Chase AG, outlined a vision of the payments industry in 2016, a time when paper cheques are non-existent, payment by mobile phone is commonplace and biometrics have wiped out fraud.In his keynote address to European bankers from across Europe, Garvin called for a renewed banking industry effort to meet the challenges laid down by the move to a Single Euro Payments Area (Sepa). He urged Europe’s top banks to take … Continue reading Payments 2016