Category Archives: Uncategorized

Hi Brian, My family and I are big fans and long time listeners show and I really enjoyed your pop quiz in episode 654 on 18th December. Your question about card payments caught my attention because I am quite a boring person and this is one of the few things that I know anything about.Continue reading “Pop Quiz: Consumer Ripoffs”

xxx Safaricom is being investigated for the Saturday outage of its M-Pesa service that left millions of customers unable to receive or send money. The blackout is estimated to have cost the economy billions of shillings. From Safaricom probed over costly M-Pesa outage – Daily Nation. xxx xxx CA statistics show that about Sh1.5 trillionContinue reading “Safaricom probed over costly M-Pesa outage – Daily Nation”

xxx Roughly three-in-ten U.S. adults (29%) say they make no purchases using cash during a typical week, up slightly from 24% in 2015. From More Americans do not use cash in a typical week | Pew Research Center. xxx

xxx “Does the government have an obligation or a duty to provide risk free money to the general population? Does that duty persist after cash usage drops off?” From At least 15 central banks are serious about getting into digital currency – MIT Technology Review. xxx

xxx Even as cryptocurrencies collapse, DRW is not the only company persevering with experiments in both digital currencies, tokens and blockchain. From Corners of Wall Street remain undeterred by crypto crash | Financial Times. xxx

xxx A good outcome would be for data portability to encourage and facilitate competition at a layer above these data stewards, amongst the applications that provide direct value to people. From Data portability: the role governments should play – The ODI. xxx

xxx The most common answer to the problem of overly powerful firms is to break them up, as U.S. regulators once did to Standard Oil and AT&T. Yet that would destroy much of the value that these digital giants have created and probably do little to improve competition in the long run, since without structuralContinue reading “Why Governments Should Force Tech Companies to Share Their Data”

xxx A cup of Mr Rashid’s tea costs 2,000 Somaliland shillings – equivalent to $0.25 or Dh0.92 – and his customers pay almost exclusively with their mobile phones. “I never see cash,” he tells The National. From Somaliland’s world-leading move towards a cashless culture  – The National. xxx

xxx “They estimated between 15 and 35 per cent of all cash is doing its job – allowing Australians to buy everyday goods and services. But that leaves a lot of notes – at least 65 per cent of them – doing something other than being a means of exchange. Between 10 and 20 per centContinue reading “Expensive washing? Australia loses $8 billion in cash”

xxx “China’s central bank on Monday warned that rejecting cash as a form of payment was illegal, saying that such practices could eventually could cause the loss of confidence in physical money and was unfair to those not accustomed to electronic payments.” From “China says rejecting physical cash is illegal amid e-payments popularity – BusinessContinue reading “China says rejecting physical cash is illegal amid e-payments popularity – Business Insider”