Let Banks Chase Their Defaulters Instead Of Seeking Bailouts

The old saying “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time” crossed my mind when I recently read this article in which loan defaulters protest against the aggressive procedures adopted by banks to recover their loans. The typical refrain of almost every defaulter profiled in this article is “I couldn’t keep up with my … Read more

From Multichannel To Omnichannel & Beyond

Over the years, my background in IT marketing and product management has brought me close to the subject of how a software should be extended to new channels. I can recall at least five occasions on which I’ve been involved with spec’cing channel support in the past 15-odd years: ERP in Branch Office in the … Read more

Doubling Mobile Wallet Adoption By Halving Its Scope

In Mobile Wallets Should Fix What’s Broken – And It Ain’t Payments, we saw why consumers were more likely to try out mobile wallets for store loyalty cards than debit or credit cards. In this post, we’ll go beyond initial adoption and see where these two mobile wallet use cases – “mobile loyalty” and “mobile payment” … Read more

Mobile Wallets Should Fix What’s Broken – And It Ain’t Payments

My leather wallet wore out recently. With so much buzz around mobile wallets, I was wondering if I should even bother with another leather wallet. Before switching to a mobile wallet, I inventoried the contents of my wallet and arranged them into two piles. LHS: This pile contained payment related items such as cash, two … Read more

Open Letter To My ePayment Gateway Company

The proverbial ink has hardly dried on my blog post titled Mobile OTP: Cyanide Or Caffeine For Online Payments? than I saw the following “payment failure” screen on my laptop: This ‘kiss-of-death’ message appeared when I tried to pay for my broadband connection. Incidentally, it was the very first online bill payment I attempted after the … Read more

Mobile OTP: Cyanide Or Caffeine For Online Payments?

I recently received an SMS from one of my credit card issuing banks informing me about the following change in procedure for using its credit cards online: With immediate effect, for each online transaction on your BANK1 Credit Card, an OTP (One Time Password) will be sent via SMS to your registered mobile number. In … Read more

High NIM Propels Indian Banks Into FORTUNE 500

The fragmented state of the banking industry and, arguably, the relatively conservative policies of the Indian banking regulator Reserve Bank of India, have kept the assets of Indian banks somewhat subdued compared to their global peers. Not surprisingly, league tables of the global banking industry that use asset as the benchmark to rank banks, have … Read more

Five Ways to Stimulate Electronic Payments (Hint: Discouraging Cheques Is Not One Of Them)

The number of times the words “should” and “charge” appear in this article titled “RBI WANTS TO DISCOURAGE USE OF CHEQUES” got me wondering if “negative reinforcement” is seen as the only way to wean people away from their time-worn habit of using cheques and move them to electronic payments. For the uninitiated, RBI, or … Read more

Even If Customers Don’t Bother About Costs, Regulators Do

My recent post The Tug-of-War Between Different Pricing Models sparked a lively debate and attracted several comments and 1-on-1 feedback about whether customers care about costs or not. Some people believe that buyers are only interested in the value they receive from a product and are least bothered about how much it costs a manufacturer to produce … Read more