A library of snippets
xxx
NatWest expects Big Tech firms to continue driving innovation in several other ways across the payments landscape, with digital wallets specifically highlighted as having an influential impact on consumers’ relationship with financial services.
xxx
xxx
In the United States, the average consumer has four credit cards, and the total credit card debt is nearly $1.1 trillion, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
From Consumers Pick National Banks Most for Primary Credit Cards.
xxx
Although the share of adults holding a primary credit card issued by a national bank has declined from 76% to 68% since 2020, these FIs are still the dominant issuers of consumer credit cards in the U.S.
xxx
Innovations such as digital wallets aim to form the foundational technology that will allow governments and businesses secure digital identities.
“We never really thought about what does it mean to identify a person on the internet in a way that is portable and doesn’t require you to rely on a single private platform,” Mike Brock, CEO of Block’s TBD, said in an interview with PYMNTS.
From New Car Sales Expected to Reach Highest Level Since 2019.
xxx
xxx
Although the share of adults holding a primary credit card issued by a national bank has declined from 76% to 68% since 2020, these FIs are still the dominant issuers of consumer credit cards in the U.S.
From Consumers Pick National Banks Most for Primary Credit Cards.
xxx
xxx
o do this licitly, you need to get a money transmitter license everywhere your customers want to pay as many as one employee, which (very quickly) means all 50 states and then some.
This is not hard relative to creating a fusion reactor, but is hard relative to creating a functioning Rails app.
xxx
xxx
Visa’s efforts, via Visa Direct, have made headway in forging that connectivity, with more than 65 use cases already in play and the ability to reach more than 8.5 billion endpoints. The payment network has developed, with partners, aliases and directories that allow instant access to sender and receiver bank accounts by linking to emails or mobile devices — even nicknames.
From Visa: Orchestration Layers Pave Way for Instant Payments Ubiquity.
xxx
The aliases could (and should) be digital identities.
The PSR
If a consumer is classed as vulnerable, the consumer standard of caution
exception can’t be used by the PSP to deny reimbursement.
xxx
Deloitte conducted a consumer survey in Germany, the most pro-cash nation in the EU, with intriguing results for the digital euro.
71% of 18-34 year olds trust the ECB to issue the digital euro! (See graph above) But a mere 23% of 55+ year-olds trust the ECB! How ironic is that?From: Web3 isn’t just for crypto, but MUST use CBDC if it practices the “inclusion” it preaches..
xxx
xxx
Every day, 3 trillion dollars worth of transactions are handled by a 64-year-old programming language that hardly anybody knows anymore.
It’s called COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), and despite the fact that most schools and universities stopped teaching it decades ago, it remains one of the top mainframe programming languages used today, especially in industries like banking, automotive, insurance, government, healthcare, and finance. According to the International Journal of Advanced Research in Science, Communication and Technology (IJARSCT), 43 percent of all banking systems are still using COBOL, which handles those $3 trillion daily transactions, including 95 percent of all ATM activity in the US, and 80 percent of all in-person credit card transactions.
The problem is that very few people are interested in learning COBOL these days. Coding it is cumbersome, it reads like an English lesson (too much typing), the coding format is meticulous and inflexible, and it takes far longer to compile than its competitors. And since nobody’s learning it anymore, programmers who can work with and maintain all that code are a increasingly hard to find. Many of these “COBOL cowboys” are aging out of the workforce, and replacements are in short supply.
From The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore | PCMag.
xxx
xxx
It’s the potential for games to act as bank accounts.
Ok, not literally, but here are some interesting data points (taken from the report):
There are 1.7 billion underbanked adults in the world, but roughly 1.2 billion of them own a smartphone.
There are roughly 3.4 billion gamers, or 1 in every 2.36 people.
90% of Gen Z, 80% of Millenials and 63% of Gen X interact with games and/or the metaverse.
xxx
Snippings