BFSI

Pune Metro Card – Third Time’s The Charm

by

At its inception two years ago, Pune Metro supported the following ticketing options: Human-operated ticket counter Self-service kiosk WhatsApp e-ticket Contactless prepaid card. Since I’ve a great experience with contactless prepaid cards on rapid transport networks in several cities in the world (e.g. London Oyster Card), I jumped at the last option. My first attempt … Read more

How Are Regulators Cracking Down on Cybercrime In Different Countries?

by

In Why Is It Hard To Catch Cybercriminals?, we considered a canonical case of a cybercrime:  Joe pays Jane online for something and does not receive that something he was promised. In the following two years, we’ve been hearing about romance scam, courier scam, pig-butchering scam, investment scam, online job scam, and so forth. All … Read more

The Zero Sum Game Myth: When Bubbles Are Good

by

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?

by

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

by

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?

by

(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

Two Ways To Boost The Adoption Of UPI Lite

by

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