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

Utilities: New Source Of Subscription Trap

Media, OTT, SaaS and other recurring-revenue businesses generate revenues from subscriptions funded by credit card- (or debit card-) based standing instructions that automatically charge the cardholder’s account every month. As their consumer, if you want to stop a subscription, you’d want to click a cancel button on their website or app and be done with … Read more

How AI Can Take Readability Of Bills And Statements To The Next Level

In Bills And Statements Are Hard To Decipher, we noted that it was very hard to read bills and statements from banks, ecommerce companies, retailers and other industries. We took two examples and did a deep dive to understand the full extent of the indecipherability problem: Ecommerce Bill Bank Statement In this post, we will … Read more

eBill Vendor Increases Upsells And Improves Win-Rates

Here’s our latest success story: eBill Vendor Increases Upsells And Improves Win-Rates “QRcomaniacs” reinforce vendor’s thought leadership positioning Our customer is a leading provider of eBilling and eStatment solutions to telecom, banking, insurance, utilities and other industries. Apart from the basic details of consumer, amount and deadline, eBills generated by the software carried instructions on … Read more

Shortselling For Normies

(This is a commentary on how shortselling works and not a guide to carry out shortselling.) I recently posted the following update on social media: @s_ketharaman: Startup Idea: Hindenburg Research of India. Conduct research in India. Launch hit jobs on foreign companies. 10% of large publicly traded firms in USA allegedly commit securities fraud, so … Read more

Revisiting Recurring Payments On The First Anniversary Of RBI Emandate

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?

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

(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

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

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