May, 2022

• 1 May

  Security Notes: How Crypto Could Help Ukrainians

  

  It is incumbent on all of us, witnessing in our living room the horrors of Ukraine, to ask ourselves: is there something we can do? For the digital-payment community, the answer is yes. Bitcoin and its many variants are technologies that have been serving the purposes of investors, speculators, criminals, …
• 1 May

  The Next Big Visa-Mastercard Rival Is…Zelle?

  

  Is the Zelle peer-to-peer payments network soon going to the point of sale? That’s the big question raised by payments-industry experts after The Wall Street Journal reported in April that Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co.—two of the seven big financial institutions that own Early Warning Services …

April, 2022

• 1 April

  Payments 3.0: How EWA And BNPL Could Help End Poverty

  

  Buy now, pay later and earned-wage access services could be powerful tools to end poverty, if they are not regulated out of existence. Both of these products directly address one of the main factors causing poverty: income volatility. In “The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of …
• 1 April

  Security Notes: The Digital Dollar And Personal Liberty

  

  On March 9, President Biden unleashed the federal government to reform the U.S. dollar into a digital entity—an historic milestone. A big transformation is looming. Done well, the digital dollar will cement U.S. leadership in global finance. Ill-done, America will become second tier. The digital dollar has the power to …
• 1 April

  An Acquisitive Shift4 Buys Into Blockchain And Cross-Border Processing

  

  Shift4 Payments Inc. last month said it has concluded agreements to acquire international e-commerce acquirer Finaro and cryptocurrency-based donation platform Giving Block in deals valued at $875 million in cash and stock, including future earnout provisions. The latter deal has already closed, while Allentown, Pa.-based Shift4 expects to close the …

March, 2022

• 1 March

  Payments 3.0: How Free Checking Dogs Financial Services

  

  The entire financial-services industry shot itself in the foot with free checking. Free checking taught customers that they should not pay any fees for the services they receive from banks and other financial companies. The attitude is, “Why should I pay to access my own money?” Since these same customers …
• 1 March

  Security Notes: Can the Law Tame Crypto Crime?

  

  Even crypto businesses that keep saying crypto crime is tolerable recently had to acknowledge a whopping $14 billion in reported criminal crypto activity occurred in 2021. The true figure is at least an order of magnitude higher, since many ransomware victims don’t even report the crime. The sad reality is …
• 1 March

  Banks’ Gift to Independent ATM Deployers

  

  As banks pull ATMs from underperforming off-premise locations, it is creating an opportunity for independent ATM deployers to fill the void, says a report from RBR, a London-based research and consulting firm. The trend, which is being driven in part by banks’ growing emphasis on providing cashless payments to their …

February, 2022

• 1 February

  Payments 3.0: A Less Cozy Regulatory Climate

  

  The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s recent data requests show how regulators are teaming up and provide clues about the near future. In October 2020, the Bureau announced that it requested data from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, PayPal, and Square (now Block) about their payments operations, and that it would compare …
• 1 February

  Security Notes: The Lure of Self-Referential Money In a Cryptocurrency Age

  

  In retrospect, Bitcoin had to be expected. Secular humanism challenges God-centered culture, and quantum physics redefines reality to what we humans measure—nothing more. So money that is hinged on nothing external to itself is a natural followup. But if this self-anchored philosophy is wrong-footed, then as it rises to dominate …