ISO 20022: Waiting For Godot Moment

Limitation in field length of payment messages causes endless number of problems in electronic payments. Let me give a few examples: I was unable to fit the payee name MCS MERIDIAN CLIENT ACCOUNT HOUSE RENT 98 MERIDIAN PLACE JUN 2008 in the payee field of my bank’s payment screen. My bank told me to change … Read more

Three Ways To Screw Up A Sales Incentive Policy

(This post is a slightly edited version of my answer to the above Quora question.) Legalese is the least of your problems when it comes to sales incentive policy. The crux of the issue is to crack the incentive structure. From personal experience, that’s a non trivial problem. Sales incentive policies always begin with good … Read more

AWS Snowmobile: Because Data Is Still Transported Physically

AWS Snowmobile is an 18-wheel truck that physically transports Exabyte-scale data from customers’ premises to AWS Regions in a 45 feet container. For the uninitiated: 1 Exabyte = 1000 Petabyte = 1,000,000 Terabytes = 1,000,000,000 Gigabytes. AWS Regions are separate geographic areas that Amazon uses to house its AWS infrastructure. These are distributed around the … Read more

Why Rockstar SDRs Obsess Over Dial Volume

This blog post is about a controversial topic in B2B technology inside sales: Dial Volume. It will not endear me to Inside Sales folks. Nevertheless, since dial volume pushes the revenue needle, I decided to write it. Cold calling remains an important part of business development in large ticket B2B technology products and services. Every cold call … Read more

How Can Fincumbents Grow When Banks Are Shedding Customers?

In their diatribes about the underbanked, unbanked and financial inclusion, many suppliers of financial services technologies to banks (aka “fincumbents“) and members of the digerati threaten banks with the risk of losing customers to prepaid cards, P2P lending platforms, money transmitters, and other types of fintechs. In their urge to dish out free, unsolicited advice, … Read more

Calling BS On Banking The Unbanked

“Financial inclusion”, “banking the unbanked”, blah blah blah. Call them what you want. But they all mean the following: Financial Inclusion / Banking the Unbanked – What They Mean People want to borrow money only from banks; people want to deposit their savings only in banks. But, since they can’t access a bank, they’re forced … Read more

Frictionless Loyalty Programs – FAASO’s Case Study

The quick service restaurant chain FAASO’s recently launched MOBILE wrAPP, an ordering, payment cum loyalty app. Available on Android, iOS and Windows, the app lets users locate stores, browse the menu, place delivery or takeaway orders, and make online or cash on delivery payments. To incent repeat purchase, the company credits INR 400 (~US$ 6.67) … Read more

Does Cloud Increase Vendor Lockin Risk?

For all the marketingspeak from technology providers about open systems blah blah blah, seasoned CIOs know that every software purchase is accompanied by a certain level of risk of getting locked in to that particular vendor. The risk is caused by user comfort, proprietary programming language and opaque database structures, among other factors. Cue to … Read more

Marketable Items Let You Have Your Content And Eat It Too

In his blog post titled Wasted Words – Why Marketing Content Longer than 3 to 5 Items Does Not Work, Gartner Research Director Hank Barnes makes a strong case to technology vendors for simplifying their story and emphasizing only two or three things that matter most in their marketing collateral. He goes on to explain how … Read more

Frictionless Loyalty Programs – MakeUseOf Case Study

The leading British technology and Internet apps blog Make Use Of recently launched a loyalty-cum-rewards program where readers earn points for sharing its articles on social networks. In the past, I’ve come across rewards for filling forms, completing surveys and taking other actions but this is the first time I’m seeing a website rewarding social sharing … Read more