Why Are Bills And Statements So Frigging Hard To Decipher?

People regularly complain that it’s very hard to decipher bills and statements from banks. Rant from Quora: Why are the description info on Bank Account Statements so confusing? We cannot find what is the debit for and from whom the payment / transfer has come in. End of the month when you see the statement … Read more

Test Drive: SafetyNet – Overdraft Avoidance Open Banking Fintech

SafetyNet is a UK Open Banking fintech that provides Overdraft Avoidance. While the uninitiated can Google “overdraft protection” for a prosaic definition of the term, Stanley Bing offers the following tongue-in-cheek description for one of the most lucrative products of banks: No matter what you spend with your debit card, even if you have no money in … Read more

SAAS Vendor Minimizes Churn And Maximizes Revenue

Here’s our latest success story: SAAS Vendor Minimizes Churn And Maximizes Revenue New Onboarding Wizard Eliminates Cognitive Dissonance And Enhances Usage This SAAS vendor faced abnormal churn in the weeks following new customer acquisition and reached out to us for assistance. Our analysis nailed the vendor’s use of Excel as the root cause of the … Read more

Customer Experience ≠ Customer’s Experience

Customer Experience (CX) is the customer’s takeaway of their experience with the supplier’s company, product, process and employees. Click here to see the detailed definition of CX from Gartner. Customer’s Experience (C’sX or CSX) is the experience itself. CSX is akin to Customer Journey. As illustrated in the following exhibit, Customer Journey is what a … Read more

Role Of Business Analyst In Payments

This blog post is a slightly edited version of my answer to the following Quora question: What is the role of a business analyst in the payments domain? I assume that the question refers to “payments technology” domain and consider the case of a Business Analyst (BA) who works for a tech vendor that provides … Read more

People Buy From People But Must Get Used To Paying Numbers

Back in the day, when you wanted to pay Tom, you whipped out your cheque book, wrote Tom’s name in the payee field, and handed over the cheque to Tom. Things were simple. Then banks introduced electronic payments. You no longer paid Tom. You paid Tom’s Account Number and IFSC Code / Sort Code / … Read more

Column Will Help Open Banking To Scale New Heights

Fintechs have gestured for years that they will disrupt traditional banks with their shiny apps. When asked uncomfortable questions about banking charters, finsurgents have brushed off those questions with the offhand remark that a charter is commodity. Apart from some of those trash-talking fintechs, nobody got disrupted. Not surprising because a charter is a moat, … Read more

Are Digital Natives Losing Their Data Chops? – Part 2

In Are Digital Natives Losing Their Data Chops?, we saw six examples of digital natives showing signs of losing their data chops. The litany of such new age tech companies seems to be never-ending. In this post, I will cover eight more examples. #7. BREADCRUMBS The SDR from this San Francisco-based lead scoring startup fixed up … Read more

Why Doesn’t UPI / A2A RTP Provide Scam / Fraud Protection?

There’s a lot of buzz around cybercrime. Not a week goes by when we don’t hear of someone or the other losing money to scammers and fraudsters via UPI and other A2A RTPs. Let’s consider the following ubiquituous cybercrime described in Why Is It So Hard To Catch Cybercriminals?. Joe uses UPI to buy something … Read more

Blockchain Loyalty Programs – Sizzling Or Fizzling?

I’ve been asked many times to share my take on the latest status of Rakuten Coin, an altcoin that I wrote about in How Blockchain Can Crack The Holy Grail Of Loyalty Programs four years ago. That is not strictly true. I’ve been asked only once, by someone on Twitter. @droskill: The Rakuten coin was launched … Read more