A library of snippets
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Without facts, Mr. Trump resorts to lies. He has claimed more than 360 times that the economy on his watch was the “strongest ever.” Not even close. Annualized growth under Mr. Trump ranked seventh among his 11 predecessors. And growth actually slowed during each of Mr. Trump’s three years.
From Opinion | The Truth Behind Trump’s ‘Rocking’ Economy – The New York Times:
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Then I select a payname. First of all I try £dave, but it turns out that it’s already been allocated. I try again and get £davebirch.
From One virtual account number to rule them all | FT Alphaville:
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Citi says defective software dating from the 1990s was the cause of a $1 billion wire transfer screw up earlier this month.
Citi is running multiple lawsuits to recover funds sent in error to creditors of the struggling cosmetics company Revlon.
From Decades old software led to Citi’s $1 billion transfer headache:
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“The rate of cashless payment users varies among generations. Half of those younger than 50 responded they have been using cashless payments since before the system was introduced, compared with 34% of those in their 50s, 29% of those in their 60s and 19% among those aged 70 and older. Older generations generally appeared hesitant about going cashless, with 31% of those in their 50s, 43% of those in their 60s and 54% of those aged 70 and older saying they have no intention of using cashless payments. The figure dropped to 20% among those in their 40s and younger.”
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In contrast to PayPal’s roughly $18 fintech revenue per user, Tencent has less than a quarter of that at about $4 per user. In addition, margins on Tencent’s online advertising business is almost twice as much as the margin on its fintech business.
Tencent vs. PayPal Payments SOURCE: S&P GLOBAL
As a percentage of the total average revenue per user (ARPU), ARPU from payments and other fees’ revenue per user has accounted for about 2% of total ARPU in the US and Canada, and 1.5% of worldwide ARPU.Facebook Average Revenue Per User SOURCE: FACEBOOK
At 34%, Facebook’s operating margin isn’t as good as Tencent’s. If—similar to Tencent—Facebook’s margin on payments is half its margin on advertising (17%), then payments and other fees added just $181 million—0.8% of income from operations—to Facebook’s bottom line in 2019.How can Facebook grow its payments revenue to become a more significant contributor to the firm’s bottom line? Embedding payments in digital commerce.
From Facebook’s Payments Pivot And Its Uphill Battle For Embedded Finance Domination:
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Digital identity is a key enabler and could make journeys much more convenient and secure. But ultimately, a new regulatory regime needs to be established for data sharing to deal with issues like the onward sharing of data, liability and accessible redress.
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Chris Larsen, the co-founder of Ripple, writes in The Hill that the US is fighting an economic and technological cold war against China and that the US “must do everything we can to avoid losing our economic leadership”. Well, I think Chris is worrying too much. Yes, China has a digital currency but America has a Coin Task Force. OK, so they are partying like it’s 1899 even as the inhabitant of Shanghai are bouncing redbacks between their Huawei handsets, but it’s not like they are doing nothing.
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Deference to efficient market theory and “consumer choice” has created a regulatory system that largely places responsibility — absent the most egregious abuse — on the individual consumer. In a new report, we argue that what is needed is a different regulatory approach that ties financial-services providers’ profit to customers’ financial health. In short, banks should only do well financially when their customers do well financially.
Such a regime would be similar to experiments currently happening in health care that pay providers for improving patients health, rather than paying them simply for treating patients regardless of the outcome of the medical intervention.
From It’s Time to Tie Bank Profits to Customers’ Financial Health:
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performance management is frequently conflated with strategy—producing all sorts of unwelcome consequences. The problem is that business metrics are inherently imperfect; most are used to quantify an intangible goal. Even earnings, the most common measure, represents an abstract concept. As the authors say, “Your performance management system is full of metrics that are flawed proxies for what you care about.”
Consider what happens when a company makes “delighting the customer” a strategic objective. As Harris and Tayler note, the company will probably track its progress through online customer surveys. But then employees start thinking that the strategy is to maximize survey scores rather than to deliver a great customer experience. So they may begin pestering customers to give them high scores or send out constant nudges to take the survey—pop-ups, follow-up emails, robocalls. These make for a decidedly undelightful experience.
Harris and Tayler show that we often confuse what’s being measured with the metric itself—a tendency called surrogation. This can be especially dangerous when the metric is not in fact well matched to the strategy. Consider what happened when Wells Fargo made long-term banking relationships a strategic priority and used cross-selling as its metric. Employees scrambling to meet sales goals opened up millions of deposit and credit card accounts without customer consent. The impact has been staggering. The bank has faced billions of dollars’ worth of fines, legal damages, and litigation expenses.
From The Tyranny of Numbers:
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It just happened to Steve Kirsch, for example. He wrote on Medium that at 18:10 on 11th August he received an SMS message from AT&T informing him that his “transfer request was in progress and to call AT&T if the change wasn’t authorized”. A mere five minutes later At 6:24pm, just 5 minutes later, my mobile phone service was disconnected and the hacker immediately used this to start breaking into my accounts using password recovery.
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