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

It’s Raining QR Codes – Now In Magazines

My previous posts about QR codes and Augmented Reality (see Related Posts at the bottom of this post) were based on my exposure to these technologies in newspapers, posters and billboards. I recently noticed a shower of QR codes in a new medium: magazines. Just the 10 June 2013 issue of the FORTUNE magazine featured … Read more

The Severe Identity Crisis On Twitter For Digital Marketers

This Finextra article highlights a major challenge facing digital marketers using Twitter for business development: How do you determine the veracity of a Twitter account? Put in another way, how do you verify if a certain Twitter handle really belongs to the person to whom you think it does? This is a big problem because you … Read more

3 Ways To Execute Government Technology Contracts Profitably

There’s a lot of buzz in the media about how delays in realizing payments are making life difficult for vendors selling servers, laptops, tablets and other IT hardware to the government. Click here to see a recent article on this topic. While the industry is aware that government generally takes longer to settle invoices than the private … 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