The Financial Services Club's Blog

Four out of five corporates are not ready for SEPA end-dates

For the fifth year, the Financial Services Club ran a survey of payments professionals worldwide to see how successfully regulations and technologies are changing the European payments landscape, sponsored by CGI and EBA CLEARING.

   

 

  

 

The survey ran during the spring of 2013, and was completed by 422 participants across over forty countries.  

Released in time for EBA Day in Berlin, here are the basic results.  If you would like a FREE copy of the full 40-page survey report, please email our administration.

Faster Payments is five years old

The UK's Faster Payments Service (FPS) celebrated its fifth birthday on 8th May.  

Since 2008 the system has grown rapidly, as evidenced in the transaction volumes:

• an overall transaction percentage increase of 181%
• 735.6 million annual transactions in 2012
• 900-950 million transactions anticipated in 2013
• processing around £740 billion a year

Predictive, proactive, proximity based payments

After my discussion about the augmented economy which focused upon customer service, I thought about it from the other side: transactiosns.

Many years ago, my technology firm made a play for banks to deploy data warehouses to perform predictive analytics based upon consumer propensity models of their data-based behaviours.

It may sound a little complex, but basically it was meant to use data patterns to predict what the customer would do next and whether they might need some new financial service. 

The latest on SEPA

At this year's International Payments Summit (IPS), there were discussions of many areas including social media, mobile, cloud, regulations and innovations.  These have all been summarised in a wonderfully short overview document available to paying attendees.

 However, given my interest in SEPA and the fact that we are just closing our fourth annual survey into its impact (have you taken part yet? if not, click here as it closes this Friday!), I felt compelled to extract the IPS summary of the SEPA debate at the conference and replicate here. 

Enjoy!

Asia always teaches me something: this time it's M&M

This week is Asia week, with a brief jaunt to open the Terrapinn Cards & Payments Summit in Singapore, followed by engaging in the Asian Banker’s Annual Summit in Jakarta.

I always enjoy visiting Asia as you gain unique insights you don’t see elsewhere.  Over the past years, Asia is where I first saw NFC/RFID (Octopus, Hong Kong), mobile wallets (Edy from NTT DoCoMo, Japan), mobile banks (Jibun Bank and eBank, Japan), virtual currencies (QQ, China) and QR codes (Tesco, Korea).

There’s far more that Asia shows me, so this will be an exciting week.

The week starts with the honour of being asked to cut the ribbon to officially open the Exhibit Hall at Cards & Payments ...

... and what I note straight away is a focus upon RFID chips and M2M (Machine to Machine) transactions.

The real cause of the Bitcoin bubble and burst

All the media has finally woken up to the Bitcoin phenomena when the value of Bitcoins rose from a steady $20 per coin to $266 last week … only to crash to $100 by the end of the week.

What caused this?

2013 European Payments Research – Free Report

The Financial Services Club has produced research around SEPA, the PSD and the European Payments Landscape to coincide with EBA Day over the past four years, in partnership with Logica (now part of CGI) and EBA CLEARING. 

This year’s research is underway and we would ask you to answer a few short questions by clicking here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/N2XNQC2

By completing the survey, you will automatically receive a FREE copy of the report when it is produced in May 2013.

 

Does SEPA matter and is it happening?

We had our annual debate about SEPA for the fourth year running the other day.

This time:

• Jerome Traisnel, Slimpay;
• Ruth Wandhöfer, Global Head of Regulatory & Market Strategy, Citi Transaction Services; and
• Tino Kam, SEPA Executive, Global Cash Management, the Royal Bank of Scotland

were opposed by:

• Simon Bailey, Director, CGI; and
• Peter Miller, Managing Director, Blacksmith Consulting

Over half of corporates have no SEPA idea

It’s interesting that we’re now less than a year away from SEPA’s end date for the Eurozone and so people are saying to me that SEPA doesn’t matter so much as a discussion point anymore.

This is because the banks have got it nailed.

Really?

What about the corporate customers of the banks?

SEPA Infographic

I just got this infographic on SEPA from Misys and thought it worth sharing (doubleclick for larger version). 

Nice!

The latest stats on Bitcoin

I’ve written a lot about Bitcoin over the last year:

• Is Bitcoin the future of money … or are we smoking dope?  (October 2011)
• Bitcoin: immersive or subversive? (January 2012)
• You should take Bitcoin seriously (September 2012)
• A new currency payment system is about to explode (February 2013)

But had a sanity check when looking at the charts that relate to this currency.

There are a whole variety of charts from the number of daily transactions:

Mobile’s time has come

It’s the Mobile World Congress week this week, so everyone’s talking about mobile.

In our space, the big announcements came from MasterCard and Visa.

MasterCard launched a digital wallet in a joint venture with mFoundry, whilst Visa announced an NFC partnership with Samsung.

A new currency payment system is about to explode

Before leaving the subject of socialisation, gamification, personalisation and virtualisation, there’s one last area that is worth delving into.

This one came up when I was working on my latest iteration of the way in which money is evolving, and I have the firm belief that the exchange of value digitally will be as, if not more, disruptive than the exchange of goods physically.

Don't forget socialisation and gamification: tomorrow's banking today

Building upon the discussions about personalisation and virtualisation, these are important.  In fact, as I’ve mentioned before, personalised, virtualised in real-time on my mobile is PFM-squared (does any of that last sentence make any sense?).

So then I was recently asked to address a conference with a mix of banks from all sectors, and to give examples of innovation in each of these different banking sectors.

The examples I picked had one common theme: social finance.

If you didn't think a payments revolution was taking place, think again

If you didn't think there was a payments revolution taking place, then think again as dealmaking websites like Groupon, Living Social and Huddlebuy have been pushing payments systems. 

It makes startling and notable change when you see consumer-based services pushing merchant and business based services at low cost.

Money is meaningless

I’ve blogged and presented about this subject many times before, so rather than repeating all that, here’s a summation with a new twist.

Money is meaningless because we no longer deal in money.

Sexist Barclaycard ad alienates customers

I've worked for American firms during my main working life, just as we saw the rise of political correctness (PC) and the PC-police.

It got to the stage where you couldn't even say "I like your new hairstyle", without falling foul of the PC-police (I know, as one of my male colleagues in Chicago got a reprimand from HR for saying that to a femail co-worker).

£3 million from a simple ATM skim

I was just surfing the BBC news for information about the new Governor of the Bank of England and found this as the #1 most viewed video clip today.

 

The story is about a Romanian fraudster who admitted to stealing £3 million from a card-skimming scam.  He couldn’t exactly deny it, as he was caught red-handed on CCTV when he returned to collect his high-tech skimmer.

After his arrest, police discovered he had obtained about 9,000 bank card PIN numbers.

The only thing that gets me is that I’ve seen these skimmers for years, and would have thought that the ATM technology would have developed far enough by now to stop such fraud happening.

Oh, it has?

We just need to upgrade those ATMs.

Are we on or off the rails

At SIBOS 2012, I led a session on the future of money along with Udayan Goyal ...

... and asked the basic question: will the future still be built on the banking foundation?

I'm writing up the session again, as my original description left out a core conclusion about the need to adapt to the future and not let the future happen to you.

Too fast to innovate, too slow to change

As mentioned yesterday, the regulator tries to keep up with the banks who try to keep up with customer, and I said that banks often innovate too slowly.

There are many examples of this, but the one that I come back to regularly is Chip & PIN.

Chip & PIN has been an enormous success, lauded and applauded by the Payments Council and now emulated worldwide with just the USA to follow.

The program was agreed in principle back in 2000 through APACS, the Association of Payments Clearing Services, and the implementation plan sorted out in 2003.  The EMV-based Chip & PIN program was introduced to the UK in 2005 and made mandatory in February 2006.

The great news is that after Chip & PIN was introduced card fraud decreased considerably, with lost and stolen cards down over half …