Globalization – Good or Bad?

Any discussion of globalization and its impact on a country needs to recognize that a nation comprises both producers and consumers. Producers are businesses. Consumers are J6P (Joe Six Pack or Jane Six Pack aka common man / woman). While import of cheap goods from China might cripple American manufacturers, it is a positive for … Read more

Why Calculating ROI for Software Is Harder Than You Think

Every now and then, somebody will question ROI metrics reported by B2B tech vendors. Let’s take the following LinkedIn post for example: Tech vendors’ use of the term “ROI” is maddening. Two recent (ROI claims) triggered this rant. “Did you know that financial services firms that use Salesfarce achieve a 188% ROI?” Really? EVERY ONE … Read more

The Zero Sum Game Myth: When Bubbles Are Good

1 + (-1) = 0. Traders look at the 1 at the start of the equation and treat trading as a profitable activity. Engineers look at the 0 at the end of the equation and dismiss trading as a zero sum game. John Maynard Keynes won the Nobel Prize in Economics for proposing digging a … Read more

DeepSeek – Engineering Innovation Or Financial Jugglery?

When consumers are asked to pay for some product or service, they think twice about whether to consume it. There’s a cognitive overhead in all decisions but the one involved in micropayments is acute because it’s more mentally taxing to decide whether or not to spend, say, $0.10 to read an article than the $0.10 … Read more

Debunking the “Hidden Cost” Myth: When Free Is Really Free

Whenever they hear that something is free, some find it fashionable to remark that “there’s no free lunch” or “you’re paying in a different way”. In other words, these people insinuate that there’s always a “hidden cost” behind free products and services. On the face of it, their counterpoint seems to be right. After all, … Read more

Why Do Banks Partner With Visa When They Can Create Their Own Credit Card?

(This post is a slightly edited version of my answer to the above Quora question.) Banks have created a plethora of products like checking account, savings account, mortgage, High Frequency Trading, Structured Finance Products, and so on. What’s one more? Therefore, the OP’s question prima facie makes a lot of sense. In fact, back in the … Read more

Will ChatGPT Kill Systems Of Record?

Klarna recently announced that it is shutting down Salesforce, Workday and other SAAS applications that it has been using for years. All of the reports that I could lay my hands on only state that the Swede BNPL major will replace the SAAS giants’ software with an inhouse “AI system”. (see update at the end … Read more

Three Areas of Impact Of SaaS Repatriation

We did not reach a conclusion on the outlook for SaaS Repatriation at the end of  our previous blog post Will ChatGPT Kill SaaS?. But that doesn’t mean the fledgling trend won’t have any impact. (For the uninitiated, “SaaS Repatriation” is the new movement where companies stop using SAAS and develop the they functionality they … Read more

Two Ways To Boost The Adoption Of UPI Lite

A couple of years ago, ET Prime reported that core banking systems (CBS) at Indian banks were creaking under the load of burgeoning UPI volumes. Being an account to account realtime method of payment (A2A RTP MOP), every UPI transaction pings the CBS of the payor’s  bank. Suppose a payor (aka remitter) spends a total … Read more

SaaS Repatriation – For & Against Faceoff

In Will ChatGPT Kill SaaS?, I coined the term SaaS Repatriation to describe the nascent practice of enterprises shutting down their SaaS products and developing AI systems inhouse using ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and Replit. This is like the good old custom development of software, just built by these three popular AI coding copilots rather than … Read more