Why Do Banks Partner With Visa When They Can Create Their Own Credit Card?

(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

Will ChatGPT Kill Systems Of Record?

Klarna recently announced that it is shutting down Salesforce, Workday and other SAAS applications that it has been using for years. All of the reports that I could lay my hands on only state that the Swede BNPL major will replace the SAAS giants’ software with an inhouse “AI system”. In the absence of details … Read more

B2B Data Sharing By SAAS & AI: Whose Data Is It Anyway?

Regulatory mandates EU PSD2 in the European Union and Reg 1033 in USA have decreed that banking data belongs to consumers and stipulated that banks must let consumers access their master and transaction data and also that they must provide a convenient way for consumers to share their data with fintechs. I call this “B2C … Read more

Three Areas of Impact Of SaaS Repatriation

We did not reach a conclusion on the outlook for SaaS Repatriation at the end of  our previous blog post Will ChatGPT Kill SaaS?. But that doesn’t mean the fledgling trend won’t have any impact. (For the uninitiated, “SaaS Repatriation” is the new movement where companies stop using SAAS and develop the they functionality they … Read more

Two Ways To Boost The Adoption Of UPI Lite

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

SaaS Repatriation – For & Against Faceoff

In Will ChatGPT Kill SaaS?, I coined the term SaaS Repatriation to describe the nascent practice of enterprises shutting down their SaaS products and developing AI systems inhouse using ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and Replit. This is like the good old custom development of software, just built by these three popular AI coding copilots rather than … Read more

Innovate Now, Invent Later

To: editet@timesgroup.com Subject: India’s Gotta Reset & Dance | Letter to the Editor Dear Editor of Economic Times: This has reference to the op-ed titled “India’s Gotta Reset & Dance” by T K Arun in today’s edition of Economic Times. Nobody denies the benefits of R&D. The only questions in the context of India are … Read more