Episode 6 - 8th October 2015

Good morning, welcome to Payments Monitor, my name is Faisal Khan, today is the 8th of October 2015, and some top stories of interest in my feed are:

TOP STORIES

Lets start with the bad news. If you’re a Deutsche Bank shareholder, you have everything to be worried about. The German bank just announced 6 Billion Euro loss for its 3rd quarter, and a new record. The 7 Billion Dollar loss sent shockwaves throughout the financial world, no one was expecting this. Germany’s been experiencing an extended summer of discontent, considering the Volkswagen emissions scandal.

Deutsche Bank will be initiating jobs cuts, pay cuts, and cleaning up banker’s bonuses. As far as dividend to shareholders is concerned, I’m afraid things aren’t looking rosy on that front either.

The European parliament just formally adopted the revised Directive on Payment Services, better known as PSD2. The new directives essentially set new rules to boost competition and innovation whilst at the same time improving consumer protections.

The revised rules will make bill paying less costly, and will allow payment players to use mobile and online tools to make these payments on client’s behalf. Also add to this mix, data protection and liability rules for payment service providers (PSPs) and foster competition by creation of more banking APIs.

China steps up its game to establish its own cross-border interbank payments and settlement system, as an alternative to SWIFT. Called CIPS (China Interbank Payments System) will be connecting 11 domestic banks and eight foreign institutions. The system’s default currency will be the Chinese Yuan (which if you hear yesterday’s podcast, became the 4th most traded currency in the world after the US Dollar, Euro and British Pound).

China’s move in establishing the CIPS is to buffer any counter threat that the US and EU can apply on the de facto platform, i.e. SWIFT.

It seems the hacking wave (or rather the discovery of being hacked) is never ending. Hackers affiliated with the Chinese Government have breached LoopPay, the near-field payment technology company bought by Samsung. Samsung Pay, which was launched in the US last month has amassed an impressive US$ 30 Million in transaction since its debut. Samsung spokesperson say, while they were hacked earlier in March this year, no customer data seems to have been stolen.

Samsung also is expect to rebound both profits and sales on third quarter earnings. Profits are expected to hit US$ 6.3 Billion.

BLOG OPINION

If you’re looking for an authentic place to get solid research on financial inclusion, I would highly recommend that you look at intermedia.org – they publish detailed reports, especially their Wave Reports on financial inclusion for many countries. Worth a look if that’s your arena.

DID YOU KNOW

That by 2017, China will have more IMAX screens than the US, a little something I picked up this morning on Bloomberg GO! Oddly enough Google just bought the domain abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com – why? I have no clue.

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