Official Blog of GTM360 Marketing Solutions
When Payments Banks were launched in 2014-15, they were greeted with a lot of fanfare. They were expected to bring hundreds of millions of unbanked Indians into the folds of organized financial services because their digital-only footprint would make it cost-effective from them to go to the rural hinterlands where traditional banks with branches have not … Read more
Back in the day, we learned in statistics that you need a sample size of at least 2% of the size of population to make statistically significant inferences about the population. In common speak, the expression “statistically significant” means “valid”. Nevertheless, if you’re like me, you regularly come across surveys conducted on sample size of … Read more
My personal experience with EMV payment cards goes back over 15 years. Credit cards and debit cards were both EMV-compliant in Germany when I was there in the early 2000s. They had a chip and required the entry of PIN on the POS terminal to complete a payment. Ditto in UK when I was there … Read more
In Three Ways To Lie With Charts, we saw the following tactics: Slippery Slope Slide Floating Origin Fraud Dual Axis Deception The most common reason for people to lie with charts is that they are shilling some product, service or ideology and run into facts that derail their pitch, so they need to lie to continue … Read more
Since I wrote Flight Delay Insurance – Why Blockchain?, I’ve come across several updates that have reinforced my skeptical views around the claim of decentralization and raised new doubts about the touted advantage of resilience. UPDATE #1: SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE Let me take the following remark in my original post: Data is distributed across multiple … Read more
Lying with charts is the natural progression from Lying With Big Data and Pixie Dust Sampling – Or How To Commit Harakiri By Lying With Big Data. I have come across the three ways of doing that. #1. SLIPPERY SLOPE SLIDE There are charts that gyrate up and down for no apparent reason other than that … Read more
There are many business relationships where trust is one-sided. Let me give a few examples of such relationships in which the contract between two parties A and B is such that A needs to trust B but B does not need not trust A. #1. METERING Mobile phone subscriber consumes data. The consumption is measured … Read more
Direct-to-Consumer financial technology startups are new age companies that sell bank accounts, loans and other financial products directly to end users. In this post, we’ll use the term “Fintechs” to refer to these D2C firms and “Fintech” to refer to the industry as a whole. Fintechs are different from “Fincumbents”, which is a term I’ve … Read more
Like me, you may have come across people who appear obsessed with security but happily book cabs, send messages, order food, and even make payments without entering a single password / PIN on their smartphones. This is not as contradictory as it seems if you look at the end-to-end customer journey. For the uninitiated, Customer Journey can … Read more
On the tenth anniversary of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the media is full of articles questioning why nobody went to jail for the Great Financial Crisis that followed. Take, for instance, A crisis nobody went to jail for. According to most of these articles, the GFC happened beause of greed, laziness, cronyism and cheating … Read more