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Pune

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2009

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Security Payments Regulation & Compliance People Retail banking Wholesale banking Cloud DevOps Start ups Cryptocurrency Markets Financial Crime Covid-19 Predictions

Ketharaman's blog archive

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Ketharaman Swaminathan

Founder and CEO at GTM360 Marketing Solutions

Message Posts: 140 Comments: 4,374

Bio As Founder and CEO, S. Ketharaman provides overall direction and leadership toward setting and achievement of GTM360's goals and objectives. Career History S. Ketharaman has a unique combination of Information Technology products and services experience resulting from his professional career spanning over two decades at leading technology companies like Fujitsu, Oracle, Ramco and Wipro. More at http://www.linkedin.com/in/sketharaman

Blogs

Calling BS Of Bank Fintech Partnership

19 Jul 2023

Fintech came into existence with the charter of disrupting traditional banks. It sought to achieve its mission by democratizing finance with modern technologies and superior customer experiences. The plan was to unbundle banking into multiple products, be a CHILL entrant in each product, bring the unbanked and underbanked into its fold first, then...

Calling BS On Banks Privatize Profits And Socialize Losses

02 May 2023

I first heard the meme "Banks privatize profits and socialize losses" soon after some banks were bailed out during the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-8 in USA. The narrative was, when banks do well, they distribute their profits to their employees and shareholders whereas when they do badly, they palm off their losses to taxpayers who res...

ISO 20022: Waiting For Godot Moment In Finance

17 Apr 2023

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 it to MCS MERIDIAN CLI. I wasn't sure if ...

How To Fire Developers And Assemble Software From APIs

01 Mar 2023

A few years ago, I'd visited the South Indian temple town of Tirupati with my family. On the way, whenever the train stopped at a station, the engine was switched off. But the air-conditioning still worked because it was powered by huge battery packs installed in the AC coach. Coincidentally, the manufacturer of these battery packs is located clos...

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Ketharaman is Commenting on

What is an Inclusive and Instant Payment System (IIPS)?

Inclusion is already defined as “Any regulated financial institution (FI) can join the payment scheme.” I'd leave it like that. If you want an alternative system based on "empowering any FI...", then you can coin another expression e.g zinclusive. Moving on from nomenclature, important as it is, I want to bring up what I call "overlay apps" (for the lack of a better expression) that sit between the payor / payee and the payment rail. Examples include Zelle over TCH-RTP in USA and Walmart PhonePe over UPI in India. In the past, I've heard about PayByBank, PingIt et al over FPS in UK but nobody seems to talk about them these days. These apps provide value added features that the rail does not. For example, Walmart PhonePe provides "confirmation of payee" sorta functionality, which the undergirding UPI scheme does not (AFAIK). These apps are not owned by the rail provider and can pull out of the market any time e.g. Soon after Russia attacked Ukraine, Google Pay canceled Russia, thereby leaving Moscow Metro commuters high and dry and unable to buy tickets. Keen to know if you would accept a payment system as "IPS" if its rail does not provide the features listed by you but overlay apps do?

28 Aug 2023 Reply Read article

What is an Inclusive and Instant Payment System (IIPS)?

While it doesn't have the same ring about it as RTP, FPS, and the other acronyms, RTRP (real-time retail payments) is the most factually accurate term. I'm amazed at how companies that are purportedly subject matter experts in payments play footloose with terminology, pass it on to Wannabe Experts who play more footloose until it reaches the common man who posts total garbage. To take an example, ACI compiled a global league table of "Real Time Payments Leaders" based on "Number of Real Time Transactions". It obviously excluded RTGS, which is very much a Real Time Transaction. It also excluded TPV (Total Payments Value) of A2A RTP. Then Statista converted this data into a chart which was labeled "Payments". Right, no mention of Digital Payments or Real Time Payments, let alone Retail Payments - it just said Payments. Then a rando on Twitter circulated the Statista report calling it "Digital Payments". Click here for details. Then an alma matter circulated this on our alumni WhatsApp Group claiming that UPI from India will shortly replace the digital payments infrastructure of USA!!!

28 Aug 2023 Reply Read article

AI: Do Regulators Have a Hope of Keeping Pace?

No. Regulators cannot keep up with AI. Take ChatGPT itself as an example. It's the pinnacle of leveraging of Regulatory Gap, which has been the strategy followed by fintech, rideshare, room share and many startup industries in regulated industries. While training ChatGPT, OpenAI scraped data from billions of websites without their express permission and probably in violation of their TOS. Now that ChatGPT is launched and popular, OpenAI has announced steps that website owners can take to prevent their websites from getting scraped by OpenAI's bot. This is unethical, if not also illegal in some jurisdictions. But will any regulator shut ChatGPT down now? Had OpenAI announced, in advance, its plans to slurp the content of billions of websites when it started doing so a few years ago, I can bet that ChatGPT would have been DOA.

25 Aug 2023 Reply Read article

Citi introduces 'relationship tiers' for retail customers

For a fairly long time, banks have been having different "account plans" with different fees, features and balances. Any idea how Citi's new "relationship tier" is any different from those?

25 Aug 2023 Reply Read article