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Location
London
Member since
2009
Writes about
Payments Regulation & Compliance Retail banking Cryptocurrency

Jeremy's blog archive

2022 (1) 2021 (1) 2020 (5) 2019 (2) 2018 (7) 2017 (7) 2016 (8) 2015 (6)
Jeremy Light

Jeremy Light

Co-founder at Fourdotzero
Message Message me Posts: 37 Comments: 59
Bio Fourdotzero is a payments, market intelligence and technology company. Payments to fuel the Fourt Industrial Revolution Career History Fourdotzero November 2020 to present Ripple April 2018 - October 2020 Accenture until Feb 2018

Blogs

Blockchain in Banking and Financial Services

The Risks to Society of Central Bank Digital Currencies

17 Jan 2022

There is much written about CBDCs but little on the risks to society a CBDC would create. I see these risks falling into three categories: 1. economic 2. financial 3. human rights Economic Risks The key economic risk is inflation. A CBDC can be created at the press of a button and distributed widely, inflating the money supply without any correspon...

Blockchain in Banking and Financial Services

Bitcoin at 50,000 USD

18 Feb 2021

Bitcoin at 50k USD In March 2018 I posted a Finextra blog “Bitcoin at 50,000 USD”. It was framed as a scenario rather than a prediction and I observed that no-one could possibly know with any certainty what would happen next with Bitcoin. However, the objective of the blog was to examine what Bitcoin and the crypto landscape would look like should...

1

The Payments Business

Big Brother is Watching You - Payment Systems, Surveillance Systems, Control Systems

29 Sep 2020

1230 words, 4:50 min read An Orwellian Dystopia As more and more payments become digital, a key question for payment systems architects is how to preserve the privacy of their users. Without privacy, payments systems risk becoming surveillance systems for government agencies and for corporations. In turn these can be extended into control systems ...

Blockchain in Banking and Financial Services

The Future of Money and Payments

08 Sep 2020

1200 words, 4.5 minute read Central bank balance sheets are ballooning the world over, and in parallel, adoption of shared ledgers using blockchain is accelerating. These major shifts indicate the global architecture for money and payments is on the cusp of structural change. Blockchain analysis and debate are dominated by a focus on cryptocurrenci...

See all Jeremy's blogs

Jeremy is Commenting on

Lloyds, Santander, Barclays, TSB demand Google, Facebook reimburse online fraud victims

  The principle of "polluter pays" should apply also to the banks who allow fraudsters to operate fraudulent bank accounts to collect the funds they scam. I keep on repeating this and I am amazed at how little visible action is taken by the banks and the regulator to address this issue head on. When fraud using bank transfers is committed the account the stolen funds are sent to is always known as are any accounts the funds are then forwarded to. It is equivalent to always knowing the registration details of the getaway car in a robbery and all subsequent getaway cars the criminals use - but doing little with the information. Innocent victims need to be reimbursed and the platforms that facilitate the scams have a duty to prevent them - but banks need to do more to prevent fraudulent account openings and account takeovers and do more to recognise and trace fraudulent payments flows into and out of their accounts. It is also bizarre that confirmation-of-payee is used by (some) banks to alert payers if the beneficiary name they think they are paying is different to the account name, a red flag for potential APP fraud, but the receiving bank is under no obligation to do the same, very simple check for incoming payments, again a red flag that the account may be fraudulent if the names are different.

25 Jul 2022 Reply Read article

Lords Committee pours cold water on UK CBDC

  CBDCs pose financial, economic and human rights risks to society if implemented incorrectly. However, as a base layer in a monetary architecture  CBDC as collateral for a nation’s payment system and for private programmable money could drive innovation. The challenge is to design and implement a CBDC so that it can never evolve out of the base layer and be abused by governments to print money or control society. Watch out for my blog on CBDC risks, here and on Linkedin coming shortly.   

13 Jan 2022 Reply Read article

Fintech founders accuse Starling's Boden of trying to stifle innovation

  The OBIE Open Banking stats are available on https://www.openbanking.org.uk/api-performance/ The UK contactless cards stats used to be freely available but now they are consolidated under UK Finance I believe you need to be a member to get access to historical data https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/data-and-research/data

05 Jan 2022 Reply Read article

Fintech founders accuse Starling's Boden of trying to stifle innovation

  A lot of people (including me) thought contactless cards were a failure for at least the first five years after UK launch (2008). However, if you looked at transaction volumes they were consistently tripling each year and continued to do so, accounting now for > 60% of all UK card payments. It is still early days for Open Banking payments, but adoption may be following a similar path to contactless cards, with recent monthly transaction volume quadrupling year-on-year (3m Nov 21 v 740k Nov 20 accoring to OBIE data). As ever with payments, look for sustained exponential growth to spot successful new services and networks. Avoid linear thinking in these situations or risk being  wrongfooted, as many banks and retailers were with contactless (as recently as three years ago a major UK high street electronics retailer still had hand written "No contactless" signs on its POS tills). My bet is that Open Banking payments will thrive. However, for AIS services, the data tells a different story - AIS API calls are considerably higher than for payments but in Nov 21 were 8% below their peak in July 21. AIS Open Banking seems to have stalled - maybe Fintechs are struggling to find uses for AIS data but even so it is too early to write off AIS as a failure.  

04 Jan 2022 Reply Read article