Unpacking “Embedded Finance” From Consumer POV

Whenever a new term enters the hype cycle, it’s fashionable for people to bandy it about all the time, sometimes correctly but most of the time loosely. Embedded Finance is one such term. In this post, we will unpack the term, specifically from the consumer point-of-view. A consumer goods retailer in India offered installment purchase … Read more

Musk Twitter Will Take Per Article Sales To The Next Level

In Why Publishers Don’t Sell Individual Articles, we saw how readers want à la carte (buy individual articles) but publishers offer only buffet (all-you-can-eat subscriptions). (While this post can be read independently, it will make more sense after reading the previous post.) Of late, some publishers are not even offering one-month subscriptions. Either their minimum … Read more

Economic Times Publishes My Take On Play Store v. App Developers Controversy

Google Play Store provides the following services to Android app developers: Listing Discovery Distribution Commerce platform Training Google does not charge any fixed fees for these services. Like most companies in their early days, app developers are short of funds when they start out. While they have aspirations to build for the world, do marketing, … Read more

Why Publishers Don’t Sell Individual Articles

When it comes to per article sales, everybody points to ready demand, takes supply for granted, and focuses on the fulfilment, mainly micropayments. This has been going on for years during which many micropayments have come and gone, demand has skyrocketed as more and more media outlets have put their content behind paywalls, but per … Read more

Wet Ink Signature v. Digital Signature

Wet Ink Signature is the conventional way of issuing consent by signing on paper with a pen. Digital Signature is the modern way of consenting digitally with a DSC (digital signature certificate). In the context of this blog post, I’m defining digital signature broadly so as to include agreement issued via password, PIN, OTP, and … Read more

How Do Banks Make Money From Credit Card Business?

Banks have created the impression that they love credit cardholders who pay only the minimum balance every month and revolve their outstandings so that they can earn juicy interest off of them. This has led the Average Joe / Jane credit cardholder to think that banks make money only on interest, and believe that they … Read more

Economic Times Publishes My Piece On “PPI Via UPI” Payments

Finance is full of hair splitting as I warned in Hair Splitting In Finance. Payments is no exception. In Retail Payments Primer, I highlighted that credit card, debit card, wallet, UPI and other retail methods of payments (MOPs) are not equal. Now National Payments Corporation of India would like us to appreciate that there are … Read more

How AI Can Take Readability Of Bills And Statements To The Next Level

In Bills And Statements Are Hard To Decipher, we noted that it was very hard to read bills and statements from banks, ecommerce companies, retailers and other industries. We took two examples and did a deep dive to understand the full extent of the indecipherability problem: Ecommerce Bill Bank Statement In this post, we will … Read more

eBill Vendor Increases Upsells And Improves Win-Rates

Here’s our latest success story: eBill Vendor Increases Upsells And Improves Win-Rates “QRcomaniacs” reinforce vendor’s thought leadership positioning Our customer is a leading provider of eBilling and eStatment solutions to telecom, banking, insurance, utilities and other industries. Apart from the basic details of consumer, amount and deadline, eBills generated by the software carried instructions on … Read more