Episode 17: 27th of October 2015.

Good morning, welcome to Payments Monitor, my name is Faisal Khan, today is the 27th of October 2015, some stories for today are:

TOP STORIES

JPMorgan Chase announced that its Chase Pay product (a challenger to Apple Pay) has signed up with the retailer consortium MCX. The Chase Pay wallet is all set to go into battle with the likes of Apple Pay, Google, Samsung and PayPal.

MasterCard is wanting to make everything a payment device. MasterCard believes that the IoT (Internet of Things) will enable consumers to make payments that have never been thought possible before.

No surprise when Accenture’s report cites that almost half of the world’s largest banks do not have directors with technology experience on their board.

The world’s largest money-transfer company Western Union is jumping onboard the social media bandwagon. The remittance giant launched WU Connect, a technology platform that integrates with consumer messaging and social media platform, enabling users to quickly send money throughout the world. Pretty much same thing as FastaCash one would presume.

China’s big B2B panda, Alibaba saw a revenue boost, predominantly attributed to mobile. Alibaba’s profits surged to US$ 3.57 Billion for its quarter ending on 30th September. The revenue recorded beat Wall Street forecasts.

BP plans to reorganize itself in view of the lower oil prices, whilst the US plans to sell down strategic oil reserves to raise cash. It seems despite the optimism of some oil producing countries in the middle-east, oil prices won’t be climbing back to the near record levels of US$ 100 and above, anytime soon.

Last week Credit Suisse released its annual Global Wealth Report. Something true and pretty astonishing from the report: if you have US$ 10 with you, you’re wealthier than 25% of all Americans.

BLOG OPINION:

There is a really interesting paper out, called “Public versus Private Blockchains” which was put out by the BitFury Group. It is an easy to read paper that explains how Public/Private blockchains can be used. It specifically cites use cases of who, how and where some blockchain implementations are being experimented.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

For nearly the past two years, myself, and my co-hosts, Brian Roemmele and Mike Townsend have been doing a weekly podcast called Around The Coin. The podcast, which is an hour long recaps some of the stories of the week as well as our perspective on all things banking, payments, fintech, startups and entrepreneurs. We publish the podcast every Sunday and if you’re in the field of banking payments or fintech, rest assured this is worth a listen. Again the URL for that podcast is www.AroundTheCoin.com

You can access all the links of this podcast on paymentsmonitor.com - That’s all for today, my name is Faisal Khan and you’ve been listening to the Payments Monitor. Speak tomorrow!