Episode 7 - 9th October 2015

Good morning, welcome to Payments Monitor, my name is Faisal Khan, today is the 9th of October 2015, and some top stories of interest in my feed are:

TOP STORIES

Starbucks will soon be accepting Apple Pay. This announcement was made by Jennifer Baily at the Code/Recode Mobile conference in California. Starbucks has already started trials of accepting payments via Apple Pay in some of it stores and expect a complete rollout by 2016.

British Bank Standard Chartered’s CEO Bill Winters announced plans to lay-off 1,000 top managers, as part of the overhaul in progress to turn the bank around. Oddly enough Mr. Winters was issued more than 6 Million British Pounds worth of shares in compensation for leaving City of London hedge fund that he founded.

Will the US economy, the largest in the world, expect a recession in 2016? A delayed Fed rate hike and turmoil in global equity markets might suggest so. The probability that US will enter a recession jumped to 15%, the highest since October 2013. However, in a separate survey, many economist predict that the US will not enter a recession until 2019.

Trouble in Malaysia where the Central Bank – Bank Negara has sought criminal proceedings against the troubled state investment fund 1Malaysia Development. The fund which has setup in 2009 by Prime Minister Najib Razak to spur growth, is actually US$ 11 Billion in debt and is also the focus of many international investigations, including the Prime Minister himself. Many sovereign investors fear their money into this fund is now essentially doomed.

With the possibility of any 2015 rate hike by the Federal Reserve fading, markets all over the world are up, including the US. This also prompted oil extended gains this Friday which have been the biggest weekly gains in over 6-years (since 2009).

US ride sharing company Lyft announced that it is implementing a faster payout solution called “Express Pay” one which allows drivers to get paid the same day. Powered by Stripe, the new service will allows drivers to get instant deposit into their bank account (minimum payout of US$ 50 applies)

BLOG OPINION

Luis Buenaventure, one of the co-founders of bitcoin remittance company rebit.ph recently published in his blog post, that bitcoin do not make remittances cheaper. Luis points out various reasons to support his claim, particularly having been inside the industry and seen where the mechanics of bitcoin and remittances are falling apart.

No surprise that a Singapore based cryptocurrency company in the remittances space, previously known as Cryptosigma has changed its name to Toast, raised new money and has pivoted away from Bitcoin.

ONE LAST WORD…

It seems it would be fintech unbecoming if we don’t include the word disruption in everything banking and payments. There are literally 100s of players trying to disrupt one thing or the other in the payments arena, yet very few players are talking about stitching it together. Perhaps it is time we started talking about collaboration instead of disruption, considering how disjointed, fragmented and isolated the various payment system in the world are. Collaboration just might be the key.

That’s all for today, have a great weekend, my name is Faisal Khan and you’ve been listening to the Payments Monitor.