Revisiting Recurring Payments On The First Anniversary Of RBI Emandate

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According to RBI Emandate: Every credit card and debit card based mandate for recurring payment and auto debit (“Standing Instruction”) will need to be re-initiated by the merchant in accordance with the new rules (henceforth “RegEM”), and processed by the issuer bank differently from before. RegEM, which came into effect from 1 October 2021, stipulated … Read more

Why Are Bills And Statements So Frigging Hard To Decipher?

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People regularly complain that it’s very hard to decipher bills and statements from banks. Rant from Quora: Why are the description info on Bank Account Statements so confusing? We cannot find what is the debit for and from whom the payment / transfer has come in. End of the month when you see the statement … Read more

Three Ways To Screw Up A Sales Incentive Policy

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(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

Core Engineering Degrees v. Noncore Engineering Jobs

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Many people complain that graduates from mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, and other “core engineering” branches take up jobs in IT, banks, consulting firms, and other “noncore engineering” sectors. This is not a new rant – we covered this topic as far back as 2015 in Core Engineering Covets Top IIT Talent But Does Top IIT … Read more

Test Drive: SafetyNet – Overdraft Avoidance Open Banking Fintech

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SafetyNet is a UK Open Banking fintech that provides Overdraft Avoidance. While the uninitiated can Google “overdraft protection” for a prosaic definition of the term, Stanley Bing offers the following tongue-in-cheek description for one of the most lucrative products of banks: No matter what you spend with your debit card, even if you have no money in … Read more

AWS Snowmobile: Because Data Is Still Transported Physically

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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

Season’s Greetings

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Season’s Greetings & Best Wishes for a Happy New Year! Welcome back to GTM360 Blog. We published 47 posts last year. The Top 10 posts in 2022 were: #10. Teardown Of Web3 Tokenonomics #9. Open Banking: EU v. USA #8. Five Ways For IKEA To Thrive #7. Five Reasons Why Amazon’s Sales Are Down By 33% #6. Fraud v Scam: … Read more

Economic Times Publishes My Playbook On How To Promote Manufacturing

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Dear Editor of Economic Times: This has reference to the op-ed entitled Make Making A Big Deal by Tushar Gore in today’s Economic Times. Every time I see the metro being built just outside my building complex, I’m fascinated by the complexity and number of moving parts involved in the construction. Therefore, I fully agree with … Read more

28 Versus 30 Days Plans Of TELCOs

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This post is a slightly edited version of my answer to the following Quora question: In coming up with plans with 28 days’ validity, I’m guessing TELCOs have been inspired by one of the 29 Psychological Tricks To Make You Buy More that leverage inherent biases exhibited by consumers. According to this Visual Capitalist article, … Read more