Category: Finance & Business

“If everybody minded their own business, the world would go around a great deal faster than it does.”

Finance & Business/History & Myth

Platformification | Taking Banks to Next Level

9 Comments

Platformification is not a new concept but is has never been applied to the banking industry before. In essence, a platform is a place where producers and consumers meet to conduct some form of exchange such as they did in the markets of yore. Platformification without digitally open platforms will not help. Open platforms help in the evolution of ecosystems, where business models are heading towards. It can create a path for relationship-building with API providers and constructs a space for those providers to access a wider customer base.

Finance & Business

COVID-19: A Knightian Uncertainty

14 Comments

Frank Knight, an economist, formalised a distinction between risk and uncertainty in his 1921 book, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. In his classic book, Knight introduced a distinction between measurable uncertainty, which he called “risk,” and “true uncertainty,” which cannot “by any method be reduced to an objective, quantitatively determined probability.”

Finance & Business/Perspective & Perception

Impressive penetration of digital payments

21 Comments

Payments are made using payment instruments. Cash, for example, is a payment instrument. So too are cheques. Digital payment is a way of payment which is made through digital modes. In digital payments, payer and payee both use digital modes to send and receive money. Innovation has been one of the biggest drivers for the growth of India’s digital payments economy. Along with the increasing adoption of smartphones, the availability of affordable mobile internet is doing wonders for the digital payments market in India.

Finance & Business

Goodbye LIBOR, Hello SOFR!

4 Comments

LIBOR has been an endangered species for some time now. LIBOR, the rate that banks charge each other to borrow money, is slated to go by the wayside in 2021 and taking its place for USD will be something called the Secured overnight financing rate, or SOFR. Almost every part of the financial world is touched by LIBOR; it is plausibly the world's most important number.

Finance & Business/Perspective & Perception

Moving towards a cashless society

28 Comments

Cash plays an important role in our modern economy, particularly among the poor, and every step forward towards cashless future should be with great caution, keeping the poor section surviving solely on informal economy included in the transition process. The digital transformation of cash is a cost savings to the entire financial ecosystem. From printing to cash management to physical infrastructure to securing and dispensing of currency, cash is very expensive. Government must think out of the box to pass these savings to consumers as incentives to embrace digital transactions.

Finance & Business

Hackers program ATMs to spew cash

15 Comments

As ATMs have become ubiquitous, so too have attacks that turn these automated tellers into robotic thieves. In July 2016, a group of masked cyber-criminals cashed out 34 ATMs operated by the First Commercial Bank, one of Taiwan’s largest banks. Criminals had collected more than 83.27 million New Taiwan dollars (US$2.6 million) in cash — without using ATM cards. The criminals did not physically damage the ATMs, nor did they use skimmers or bank cards.