Digital cash, just like digital car keys, has to work offline. That is, I need to be able to get into my car and drive off where there is no mobile signal and I need to be able to buy milk if the internet is down or if the power…

Bud Financial uses AI and transactional data in retail banking and wealth management to provide advice and prompts to customers, to measure a customer’s risk and also monitor risk across a financial institution’s portfolio. Based in the UK, Bud Financial takes advantage of open banking regulation to access customer data.…

Last Friday was the one year anniversary of the collapse of the Terra Luna Stablecoin. This event marked the end of the 2020-2022 crypto bull market and started a chain of events that would lead to the high-profile collapse of corporate crypto exchanges like FTX, BlockFi, Celsius, and Voyager. As…

For the longest time, the China payments market was an oligopoly of the privileged three: first the state-owned UnionPay, and then as the country transitioned to mobile payments, Alipay and Tenpay. U.S. card giants like Visa V , Mastercard MA and American Express AXP as well as PayPal PYPL could…

Data shows that investing in diversity is a fundamental driver of business success. Getting diversity, equity and inclusion right in any business has proven to have great returns on investment and according to Gartner it can give a business 30% “better performance.” Unfortunately, diversity is sometimes seen as an optional…

The only constant in life is change – and the US is a country with change built into its DNA. As technology expands and reshapes our economy, it’s time for our social contract to evolve with it. Artificial Intelligence is the latest platform shift that promises to radically alter our…

I always thought that “unicorns” was the wrong name for fintechs that reached a billion dollar valuation. After all, unicorns do not exist (sorry kids) but such fintechs do. They are not mythical, but they are rare. What’s more, they seem to be getting rarer. We probably should have called…

Venture investments into fintechs headquartered in North America dipped to $24.39 billion in 2022, a decline of 34% from the year prior, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence’s recently released Global Fintech Funding Trends report. After a promising start to the year, funding began a precipitous decline in Q3 as…

Phone menus, also known as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, could be a blessing when all goes well, but extremely frustrating when all a consumer wants is a human representative. How would you react if you would get lost in the maze of automated options, just to hear that you…

The paramountcy of the SWIFT interbank messaging network to cross-border payments can be measured in many ways, and SWIFT itself likes to do so with its data on transaction numbers and amounts. For instance, as of December 2022, Swift had recorded an average of 44.8 million FIN messages (payments and…