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Location

Amersham

Member since

2016

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Trusek

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Security Payments Retail banking Start ups

Chris's blog archive

2018 (1) 2017 (8)

Chris Brown

CTO at Trusek

Message Posts: 9 Comments: 14

Bio Co-founder and CTO of Trusek (trusek.com). Trusek is a FinTech development house with 3 products: a multi-currency core banking platform. A connections hub: for connecting FinTech service providers to consumers. A Universal Payments System: for creating an international instant payments network Career History Have been involved in teams that developed the first peer-to-peer currency exchange platform in 2005 and developed the first card scheme that could make instant card-to-card transfers between the UK, Uganda and Rwanda for financial inclusion and remittance. Re-invented international payments.

Blogs

Blockchain Observations

Cryptocurrencies: where to from here?

20 Sep 2018

Cryptocurrencies have shown the world a new way of paying for goods and transferring money using an international currency unconstrained by national boundaries and national politics. A new democratised, decentralised way of managing money. There are problems in paradise however. The current crop of cryptocurrencies are swiftly turning into an en...

Fintech

Who else will eat the banks' lunch?

15 Sep 2017

An industry has built up due to the inability of banks to work together directly. PayPal ($70.7B) first came into existence to add a layer of ease and security to the card schemes because the card schemes don’t provide the banks the flexibility to provide it for themselves. At that stage PayPal was eating the crumbs from under the banks' table. B...

Innovation in Financial Services

Does PSD2 have to be complicated?

28 Jul 2017

There has been a huge amount written about PSD2 recently and much of it appears to be, with the greatest respect, over complicating the issue. Very fundamentally, to provide for all of the requirements of PSD2, we have three transaction types: balance, transaction list / statement and payment. Obviously, since these requests are coming from co...

Innovation in Financial Services

An upgrade for Credit Unions and Community Banks?

21 Jul 2017

Credit unions have been a hot topic for me this week. I have had two completely independent conversations with people about them. On Tuesday night I met a chap from the US at an investor summit who mentioned he felt the US credit unions, although more numerous than the UK, were technologically challenged. The following day I met with a group, from...

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Chris is Commenting on

Ransomware attack on vendor causes outages at 60 credit unions

This is where the terrorists get the upper hand. Everyone in the IT or finance industries is so terrified of the reputational damage from a hit like this that no one is talking about what happened or what they could have done differently to have avoided the infection. Maybe they were stupid and they left themselves open to the attack but maybe the attackers had a clever new vector that we are all open to. We are certainly not going to be any better prepared after reading this article

07 Dec 2023 Reply Read article

Can a new entrant be a threat to the big card schemes?

It's interesting that what we currently have now is called a "four party model". Clearly this represents the card holder, issuer, acquirer and merchant. What about the card schemes? Surely, they are a party to the transaction. They certainly take a cut of the transaction fees. Or the processors? It's way too technical and expensive to integrate with the card schemes directly so there must be separate entities (internal or external) to allow a financial institution to connect. Then there are the Payment Service Providers (PSPs) who provide the interfaces for the merchants, the AI developers who provide the systems to check for fraud, the PCI auditors who check that all the other parties are looking after the card details properly, etc, etc, etc... It's no wonder the transaction fees are so high. I guess it would irritate me less if the service provided by the card schemes was better. Provide decent interfaces so that processors and PSPs weren't required. Provide decent security so the fraud systems and PCI DSS auditors weren't required. But they don't. What's needed is a new and better type of payment network. This would take courage, vision and some fairly deep pockets. If you know anyone like that I would be very keen to talk to them.

02 Oct 2017 Reply Read article

Banking on a pre-paid card platform

Thank you both for taking the time to comment on my article. I think the terminology I chose was making me unclear. Perhaps if I define my terms it will make more sense. A "prepaid platform" is one where the card is synonomous with the account. There appear to be many such systems in use. I fully accept that you can use a pre-paid card as an access point for an account and, if you're using an account platform, such a system would provide all the features described above and allow induction of mortgages, loans and credit as part of a continuous development. Within my narrow definition of a pre-paid card platform that would be impossible. An "account management platform" then, is one which separates people, from accounts, from access mechanisms for those accounts. It's "core banking lite" if you will. But they will run your entire financial instituion from accounting to customer service. And the prices for such systems are much lower than you might imagine.

17 Jul 2017 Reply Read article

What will replace the card schemes?

That's a great blog, thanks Ketharaman. Yes, there are elements of that, that I would like to see replicated. The frictionless onboarding, high profile user education and viral marketing are all key elements to growth of the service. Where this differs to PayTM is the network on which it's based. One that will allow real-time payments of any type anywhere in the world, will enforce transaction security and enhance AML compliance. Because the UX I described above is connected to a bank account that has been enabled by this network, the hope is that it will entice customers to give up their cards.

11 Jul 2017 Reply Read article