148 Results
Ketharaman Swaminathan Founder and CEO at GTM360 Marketing Solutions
When the authorities say cash leads to tax evasion, counterfeiting, etc., the common man ("Joe") thinks it's because cash is anonymous. When they goad him to ditch cash and move to digital payments, Joe assumes that digital payment will eliminate fraud because it's not anonymous. Then, one day, Joe uses a digital payment like UPI to buy ...
11 August 2022 /payments /crime
I’ve been asked many times to share my take on the latest status of Rakuten Coin, an altcoin that I wrote about in How Blockchain Can Crack The Holy Grail Of Loyalty Programs four years ago. That is not strictly true. I’ve been asked only once, by a certain @droskill on Twitter. The Rakuten coin was launched in 2018 - but I can find a single mentio...
06 June 2022 /startups /crypto
Open Banking is a flop, it’s too costly, clunky, and businesses struggle to make money from it. - Anne Boden, CEO of Starling Bank, to Treasury Committee (Source). After a regulatory mandate and nearly five years of media buzz, EU Open Banking recently crossed 5 million users. See Open banking passes five million user milestone. On the other hand,...
18 April 2022 /regulation /retail
In What Is Subscription Trap? (Part 1), we saw several Dark Patterns used by brands and service providers ("Merchants") to make it difficult for us to cancel subscriptions like Social network e.g. LinkedIn Premium Digital media e.g. Wall Street Journal Streaming video service / OTT e.g. Netflix Hosting service e.g. Hostgator SAAS softwa...
20 December 2021 /payments /crime
Bank accounts are not heavily branded, barring a few exceptions like the one from IndusInd Bank, which tries to create a strong brand for its bank account on the back of differentiators like return of canceled cheque. (For the uninitiated, banks return canceled cheques to customers by default in USA but they retain them with themselves in India, s...
11 October 2021 /retail /predictions
All of us are familiar with subscriptions of the following type: Social network e.g. LinkedIn Premium Digital media e.g. Wall Street Journal Streaming video service / OTT e.g. Netflix Hosting service e.g. Hostgator SAAS software e.g. Salesforce A subscription is for a given plan at a fixed monthly fee. When you sign up for it, you typically submi...
23 June 2021 /payments /crime
Every time a shiny new fintech product or service enters the market, finsurgents immediately predict the death of traditional banks. But traditional banks always go laughing all the way to the - ahem - bank. We saw this behavior when mobile wallets were the rage 8-10 years ago. Finsurgents predicted that they'd kill credit cards. Didn't happen. In...
18 February 2021 /payments /retail
In Why Banks Will Never Catch Up With Fintechs, I shared my thoughts on why I believe that Banks will never be able to catch up with Fintechs in terms of the User Experience of their websites and apps. (Above post explains the exact difference between bank and fintech.) That post was about the UX of a Financial Services Product. This post is abou...
30 October 2020 /retail /wholesale
There are a lot of fraud-like situations, where there’s no fraud in the strictest sense of the term, but consumers feel defrauded. Let me give a few examples: Price of a certain item is 225 (in whichever currency) at one outlet of a chain store in one zip code and 265 at another outlet of the same chain store in the adjacent zip code. Price of a c...
04 August 2020 /crime /covid-19
According to the popular narrative, new age companies leverage data in virtually every facet of their business (as against traditional companies that run on intuition). To a large extent, this belief is right. Many digital natives owe their spectacular rise in the last decade or two to their prowess with data and analytics. A big part of Amazon’s s...
22 June 2020 /retail
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