Snippings

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Students of marketing learn about the “4 Ps of Marketing:” Product, Place, Price, and Promotion. According to the 4 Ps creator Northwestern professor Philip Kotler:

“The marketing mix is the set of controllable variables that the firm can use to influence the buyer’s response. The four variables help a company develop a unique selling point as well as a brand image.”

Payments have become an important element of the selling proposition and should be considered the 5th P of marketing.

Varying payment terms—for example, spreading payments for a purchase over a period of time—or providing credit before or during the shopping process, marketers can influence consumers’ likelihood to buy.

Personalizing payment terms is another way for merchants to influence consumers’ choice of products and providers—and it’s the commerce platforms who have the data, analytical capabilities, and connectivity to make this happen.

From ‘Breakout’: Apple’s Plan To Pump Up Apple Card And Apple Pay And Win The Payments War:

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Mike Chambers is a recognised authority on retail payments and, as Chief Executive Officer, led Bacs Payment Schemes Limited (Bacs), the UK’s biggest retail payment system, from 2004 until 2018.

From Authorised Push Payment (APP) Scams – Payments:Unpacked:

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Despite the introduction of the Contingent Reimbursement Model (CRM) and Confirmation of Payee (CoP) the levels of fraud continue to grow

 

Receiving PSPs need to do more to ensure that a consumer is able to validate the originator of the message in channel. We believe that the recent deployment of Request to Pay (RtP) here in the UK has the potential to adders this fraud vector.

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NAB has becomes the latest Australian bank to automatically block abusive and threatening meassges in the description and reference fields of online payment transactions.

More than 10,000 abusive transactions from 6,800 unique customers were blocked in March 2022. Payments in the NAB app on iOS and Android that feature offensive words and phrases won’t be processed under the changes.

From NAB blocks abusive transactions in mobile app:

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Piotr Jan Pietrzak, Director of International Development at BLIK, the innovative Polish payment system.

Why there are doubts about EPI

EPI makes sense from a global competition standpoint, as the major cross-border retail payments infrastructures used by Europeans are owned by US companies. In addition, highly fragmented local payments don’t have the economies of scale to be competitive in today’s globalized world. However, despite all the effort, EPI success is questionable. In my opinion there are a number of reasons why yet another Pan-European payment project has underdelivered so far:

Too ambitious. It’s a long shot to address at the same time all types of retail transactions including in-store, online, cash withdrawal and peer-to-peer. It put EPI in direct competition not only with US card schemes, but also tech giants like Apple and Google. For sure, focusing now only on instant payments makes it more feasible.
Many unknowns. Many key areas aren’t fully addressed, among them: funding sources, role of local networks, consumer adoption strategy, governance, operating model, and many more. The recent brief announcement doesn’t change that.
No credible commitment. Banks fear replacing established payment systems with an unproven alternative. There is no  clear plan on how to incentivise migration, or at least it’s not well communicated.
Limited communication. Since the announcement of EPI, no visible progress has been made. The initiative has increased the number of participating banks to 33, but there was no clear plan of how the project would be executed. Now there are 13 backers, which is less than the number of founding partners, and fewer voices might improve decision-making.
Chicken and egg dilemma. EPI needs merchants ready to accept payments and users ready to make payments. Having both in place at the same time is not an easy task.
EPI might be seen as a company that reinvents the wheel, they ambitiously aim to create a viable pan-continental payment system from scratch, when Europe might have an already existing solution to the problem.

From Can Europe ever get its payment act together? – Chris Skinner’s blog:

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“Card issuance is an enormously profitable business for financial institutions, and Early Warning’s owners are large card issuers,” Grover says. “Offering Zelle as a retail payment option won’t necessarily attract new customers and will likely displace card payments. Charging consumers a fee [to make up for lost interchange revenue] is a non-starter. Any interchange fee would have to be competitive with other alternative payments for merchants to accept Zelle.”

From Big Banks’ Interest in Launching Zelle Into Retail Payments Puzzles Some Observers – Digital Transactions:

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Lee Braine and Shreepad Shukla from Chief Technology Office of Barclays Bank have a paper “An Illustrative Industry Architecture to Mitigate Potential Fragmentation across Central Bank Digital Currency and Commercial Bank Money” which expands on the Bank of England’s platform model of CBDC to make some suggestions as to what the Payment Interface Processor (PIP) ecosystem will look like. They say that implementing programmability in this ecosystems, instead of on the core ledger (ie, using smart contracts), should “reduce security risks and complexity” and I am sure that they are right.

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A study commissioned by G+D found that cotton-based coated banknotes have the lowest CO2 footprint of all available banknotes. Hybrid banknotes generate up to 13 per cent less CO2 during their lifetime and up to 24 per cent less CO2 during their production than banknotes made of polymer.

From G+D launches Green Banknote Initiative to make production and lifecycle:

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These illicit payments amount to ‘between 3 to 7.5 per cent’, depending on the amount and level of the applicant.

From Ukrainian tycoon’s wife ‘carried £22 million in cash through a refugee border crossing into the EU’  | Daily Mail Online:

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Apple wants to be able to have control when they choose to change monetization strategies. Their subscription model shift is the relationship breaker with the card networks. I agree with Jason Mikula [3] that Apple has two goals, to sell more phones and increase service revenues, and it seems that they are using a subscription model for both.

From What angered Apple which led to the “Breakout”? | by Efi Pylarinou | Apr, 2022 | Medium.

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The data showed that whenever Bitcoin’s price began to fall, Tether was issued by Bitfinex and sent to two other exchanges, where it was used to buy Bitcoin – which would then rise in price.

From Bitcoin’s gold rush was always an illusion:

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