The rise of Chief Behavioural Officer and how to hack customers’ mind

Financial Services has traditionally been a game of numbers, aggressive product (mis)selling, big bonuses and as a result too many “too big to fail”s. The rise of regulations and technology innovation within the industry has resulted in a course correction. The customer is now getting some attention. And more recently customers’ behaviour is.

Applying behavioural sciences to study how customers make their financial decisions has seen some recent traction. It is critical to bring together cognitive biases and behavioural anomalies and understand how these affect financial decisions. Add to that the impact these financial decisions have on an organisation’s PnL. An executive in a bank capable of doing that would be an ideal fit to as the Chief Behavioural Officer.

The rise of Fintech was accompanied and facilitated by the rise of friendly customer journeys. Today I spend so much, not realising how much money has gone out of my bank account with just a touch. The process is so frictionless that, the act of paying someone is invisible. When it is out of sight, it is out of mind. That’s the simplest way to make people spend more.

That is an example of how an existing process has been made less of a touchpoint. Recently, Merill Lynch conducted an experiment where they asked users to upload their photos. They would run a program to show what the users would look like in 30-40 years. That made the users more conscious of their retirement planning, and shifted their financial behaviour.

Another instance is where the Commonwealth bank of Australia launched an app for customers to set goals. The tool prompts customers to set personalised savings goals and breaks them down to smaller milestones. Since February 2019, users have created more than 250,000 savings goals – 27% of the goals being towards a holiday and 19% towards a property.

Human beings are irrational when it comes to financial decisions. An understanding of behavioural sciences is not just important to win over customers. It is critical to understand the biases that affect existing business decisions that are made within a firm. Leading valuations expert Ashwath Damodaran calls for the need to study these biases as much as the valuation principles used within investment banks.

All valuations are contaminated by bias, because we, as human beings, bring in ourpreconceptions and priors into the valuations. When you are paid to do valuations, that bias multiplies and in some cases, drowns out the purpose of valuation

Professor Ashwath Damodaran

We (my firm Green Shores Capital), recently did an event to identify top financial inclusion firms to invest/track for investments. One of the firms Confirmu, based out of Israel, study the psychological responses from a potential borrower to assess if they were trust worthy or not.

It is one thing going through the borrowers bank account, business plan and reasons for the loan. While all that could be genuine, a borrower might still not have a genuine intention to repay. Especially in countries where there are no credit bureaus, a system to predict the future behaviour of a borrower could be very handy.

While there are several tools to assess the ability to repay, there are very few to assess the intention to repay a loan.

Confirmu’s customer journey takes the users through a chat process, where the customers answer a few basic lifestyle questions, then choose their favourite between a bunch of images, and finally leave a voice answer to a question. Their machine learning powered algorithm gives a rating indicating the customer’s intention to repay.

Banks have started to focus on technology much more than they have ever done. However, as Steve Jobs puts it – ” it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing”


Arunkumar Krishnakumar is a Venture Capital investor at Green Shores Capital focusing on Inclusion and a podcast host.

I have no positions or commercial relationships with the companies or people mentioned. I am not receiving compensation for this post.

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M&A on the rise as Visa & Mastercard go for the Trillion $ Cross Border Payments

The Cross border payments market was at $22 Trillion three years ago as per a research by the Boston Consulting Group. Certainly a market to go after, and Visa and Mastercard do not seem to be shy of throwing punches at each other in the process. So who got their nose ahead?

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Earlier this year, Mastercard and Visa were fighting it out for the acquisition of Earthport. In Dec 2018, Visa had made an offer of $250 Million to acquire Earthport, a UK based payments firm. Mastercard came to the table with a $300 Million offer for Earthport. The deal was too important for Visa that they upped their offer to $320 Million and pretty much closed it. Pretty much closed – because the Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) yesterday said that they were investigating if the acquisition would create a “substantial lessening of competition” in the UK.

No deal is done until it is sold, signed and then signed again. At this point, the deal looks far from signed – however, the acquisition could help Visa’s dwindling fortunes with the cross border payments segment. Visa’s Q1 results showed that the growth of the segment was at 7% and Mastercard’s growth was at 17%. So, clearly desperate times for Visa, and no wonder they are willing to pay a bigger amount.

Earthport were considered leaders in disintermediating the cross border B2B payments space. Historically, this process saw monies taking several hops before it reached the target bank. Through Earthport’s network, the process would be simplified with just one hop, and clearly Visa see the advantage. Having backed out of the deal, Mastercard focused on acquiring Transfast, another cross border payments firm. Transfast boast a network of about 125 countries and integration with over 300 banks.

We believe Transfast gives us the strongest platform to immediately enhance our cross-border capabilities and further deliver on our strategy.

Michael Miebach, Chief Product Office, Mastercard

Mastercard have been more aggressive in driving growth through acquisitions in recent times. In Q1 2019 alone, they were involved in several other payments deals. They committed $300 Million as a cornerstone investor in the IPO of Dubai-based Network International. Network International is the largest payments processor in the Middle East and Africa, and are planning their IPO in London with a target valuation of $3 Billion. The transaction would see them take a 9.99% stake in Network International.

Mastercard are beefing up their Africa presence through their investment into Jumia, an Africa focused payments firm. Jumia and Mastercard have been working together since 2016, and the latest round would take Mastercard’s total investment into Jumia to $56 Million. The ambition is to expand aggressively across the 14 African markets that Jumia are already present in, and also help entry into other African markets.

Having taken care of Africa and the Middle East markets, Mastercard have also set sights on Asia. They have now taken part in the current funding round of Singapore based Bill.com, who handled $60 Billion in payments in the region. Bill.com raised $88 Million from several investors including Fidelity investments, Franklin Templeton, Tamasek and Mastercard.


Arunkumar Krishnakumar is a Venture Capital investor at Green Shores Capital focusing on Inclusion and a podcast host.

I have no positions or commercial relationships with the companies or people mentioned. I am not receiving compensation for this post.

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The battle of Fintech is over, the battle of TechFin is about to begin

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Jack Ma famously called Alibaba and their tech giant peer group – TechFins, declaring their intention to sneak into financial services. Banks were too focused on their battle with Fintechs then, that they perhaps were blindsided by the rise of TechFins. The first quarter of 2019 has been eventful, with major headlines from big tech firms like Facebook, Apple and Alipay.

Over the past few years, since the Fintech boom has been afoot, talks of Fintechs vs Banks have been rife. But only when China saw leap frog moments in its payments landscape, via, Alipay and WeChat, did the industry (both banks and Fintechs) pay any attention to the big tech giants. I have always said that the Tech giants had two big advantages.

They have what the banks don’t have – agility in innovation, and they have what the Fintechs don’t have – Massive Customer base (and their data).

The challenge in exploding into Financial Services for the tech giants was that, it was non-core to them. However, the evolution of Fintech use cases, and the seamless integration of these applications into consumer’s routine, have made them almost invisible. So, all the tech giants had to do was pick use cases where they could be mostly invisible – payments was a low hanging fruit.

Two weeks ago Barclays and Alipay announced their partnership. Alipay will now be available with several merchants across the UK, and allow for seamless payment experience for half a million Chinese residents, tourists and students in the UK.

Barclaycard, which processes nearly half of the UK’s credit and debit card transactions, today announced a new agreement with Alipay, the world’s leading payment and lifestyle platform, which will allow retailers to accept Alipay transactions in stores across the UK

The partnership is for UK retailers to accept Alipay payments without replacing their existing point-of-sale system. Alipay users on the other hand will enjoy the benefits of the seamless journey that they have at home.

The other key event of the last couple of weeks has been THE APPLE CARD. If you haven’t yet heard, good for you and I suggest you google at your peril. But atleast for me, the social media reaction was a bit too overwhelming. My take on the announcement –

THE GOOD

  • Secure card numbers – many of us have faced credit card frauds, but most of us wouldn’t have thought of getting rid of the card details from the face of the card.
  • No fees – Really? Is there a catch? I still can’t believe that. Especially on international transactions.
  • User experience in staying on top of expenses, card balance, interest etc.,
  • Data privacy – Apple have declared that they would stay away from customer data

THE BAD

  • Cashback of 2% is underwhelming. Many providers, including Amazon offer better benefits.

THE UGLY

  • Plastic cards? Let’s all go back to the cave. For how long are we going to hang on to plastic credit cards? That was perhaps the most disappointing thing about the launch for me. And the worst part is, the card only supports chip and pin and won’t support contactless.
  • No Android compatibility – of course, they have always been a closed ecosystem.

Irrespective of the disappointing aspects of the card, I believe, Apple has rocked the boat, and banks are feeling the heat. They are cash rich, know how to create digital+physical products, have a brand following, and can disrupt payments in a bigger way, if they chose to.

With IBM entering the remittance market through World Wire, Facebook testing out Whatsapp payments, Alipay entering the UK market in a big way, and Apple’s recent announcement, the Penny should have Dropped for the banks. And the realization should hit them that Fintechs were more of a distraction, the real battle has just begun.


Arunkumar Krishnakumar is a Venture Capital investor at Green Shores Capital focusing on Inclusion and a podcast host.

I have no positions or commercial relationships with the companies or people mentioned. I am not receiving compensation for this post.

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IBM World wire – the inevitable rise of Centralized Blockchains

72 countries, 47 currencies, 44 banking endpoints and more than 1081 unique currency trading pairs. IBM Blockchain World Wire is here.

IBM Press release on World Wire

In the last four weeks, we have had JPM Coin announcement by JP Morgan, followed by Facebook’s ambitions to plug crypto payments into Whatsapp, and now IBM have announced the launch of World wire – a cross border payments platform on Stellar protocol. I tried to call them permissioned Blockchain, but couldn’t resist calling them “Centralized”.

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When I blogged about JPM Coin a few weeks ago, and how it could affect both Ripple and SWIFT, one unanimous comment I received was that JPM Coin couldn’t be considered a cryptocurrency. I have had several philosophical arguments over the years on why a permissioned Blockchain, preferred by enterprises, do not/do qualify as Blockchain as they are centralized.

For all practical reasons, we have seen the rise and fall of decentralized Blockchain. Most of us would like a utopian decentralized world without these too-big-to-fail firms throwing their weight around, or central regulators calling the shots, or tech giants monopolizing industries with their data might. However, it is hard to make the leap from a highly centralised system (we have today) to a new decentralised way – not just philosophically, but also pracically.

The focus has shifted from ICOs to the more conservative STOs, with stable coins showing up in most use cases. Several startups I have met in the last few months have even stopped using the term ‘ICO’. The resurgence of Blockchain is now being led by big firms like IBM, Facebook and JP Morgan. I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes the norm in 2019, where we see more Blockchain based production use cases from enterprises.

IBM have been working in partnership with the Stellar Foundation for quite sometime now. When I spoke to Lisa Nestor, the Director of partnerships at Stellar in Q4 2018, she mentioned that they had a strategic partnership with IBM. She stressed the importance of working closely with incumbent organisations across industries to make Blockchain usage mainstream.

We’ve created a new type of payment network designed to accelerate remittances and transform cross-border payments to facilitate the movement of money in countries that need it most

Marie Wieck, General Manager, IBM Blockchain

As a result the IBM World wire, focused on the cross-border payments market has already enabled payment locations in 72 countries, with 48 currencies and 44 banking endpoints. It supports Stellar Lumens and a USD based stablecoin – thanks to their work with Stronghold. The network will also support stablecoins issued by several of its consortium banks. The list includes stablecoins based on Euro, Indonesian Rupiah, Philippine Peso, Korean Won and Brazilian Real. How will this affect Ripple?

Credit Ripple for the vision of using a digital asset in order to enact immediate settlement with finality. I think their implementation followed one path. Our implementation is a little bit different. We are not the issuer of an asset. In fact, what we believe is that there should be an ecosystem of a variety of digital assets that provide the settlement instruments that enable these cross-border payments.

Jesse Lund, IBM’s VP of Blockchain and Digital currencies

IBM’s strategy of keeping the platform agnostic to any kind of digital asset is a master stroke. The platform will work through the following steps,

  • Institution A chooses USD to execute a transaction with to Institution B in Euros
  • Institution A converts USD to XLM (or any other digital currency of their choice)
  • IBM Worldwire converts XLM to Euros and records the transaction on the Blockchain
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The new world of international payments look pretty disintermediated, near real time and efficient. Bringing on-board new markets is cheaper; micro payments support and end to end transparency are all benefits too. Are we still going to be hung up on “It is not really decentralized”? Do we care?


Arunkumar Krishnakumar is a Venture Capital investor at Green Shores Capital focusing on Inclusion and a podcast host.

I have no positions or commercial relationships with the companies or people mentioned. I am not receiving compensation for this post.

Subscribe by email to join the 25,000 other Fintech leaders who read our research daily to stay ahead of the curve. Check out our advisory services (how we pay for this free original research).


FCA pioneers digitising regulatory reporting using DLT and NLP

Too many TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms), I agree. Earlier this week the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published the results of a pilot programme called Digital Regulatory Reporting. It was an exploratory effort to understand the feasibility of using Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automate regulatory reporting at scale.

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Let me describe the regulatory reporting process that banks and regulators go through. That will help understand the challenges (hence the opportunities) with regulatory reporting.

  1. Generally, on a pre-agreed date, the regulators release templates of the reports that banks need to provide them.
  2. Banks have an army of analysts going through these templates, documenting the data items required in the reports, and then mapping them to internal data systems.
  3. These analysts also work out how the bank’s internal data can be transformed to arrive at the report as the end result.
  4. These reports are then developed by the technology teams, and then submitted to the regulators after stringent testing of the infrastructure and the numbers.
  5. Everytime the regulators change the structure or the data required on the report, the analysis and the build process have to be repeated.

I have super simplified the process, so it would help to identify areas where things could go wrong in this process.

  1. Regulatory reporting requirements are often quite generic and high level. So interpreting and breaking them down into terms that Bank’s internal data experts and IT teams understand is quite a challenge, and often error prone.
  2. Even if the interpretation is right, data quality in Banks is so poor that, analysts and data experts struggle to identify the right internal data.
  3. Banks’ systems and processes are so legacy that even the smallest change to these reports, once developed, takes a long time.
  4. Regulatory projects invariably have time and budget constraints, which means, they are just built with one purpose – getting the reports out of the door. Functional scalability of the regulatory reporting system is not a priority of the decision makers in banks. So, when a new, yet related reporting requirement comes in from the regulators, banks end up redoing the entire process.
  5. Manual involvement introduces errors, and firms often incur punitive regulatory fines if they get their reports wrong.
  6. From a regulator’s perspective, it is hard to make sure that the reports coming in from different banks have the right data. There are no inter-bank verification that happens on the data quality of the report.

Now, to the exciting bits. FCA conducted a pilot called “Digital Regulatory Reporting” with six banks, Barclays, Credit-Suisse, Lloyds, Nationwide, Natwest and Santander. The pilot involved the following,

  1. Developing a prototype of a machine executable reporting system – this would mitigate risks of manual involvement.
  2. A standardised set of financial data definitions across all banks, to ensure consistency and enable automation.
  3. Creating machine executable regulation – a special set of semantics called Domain Specific Language (DSL) were tried to achieve this. This functionality was aimed at rewriting regulatory texts into stripped down, structured, machine readable formats. A small subset of the regulatory text was also converted to executable code, from regulatory texts based on this framework.
  4. Coding the logic of the regulation in Javascript and executed using DLT based smart contracts.
  5. Using NLP to parse through regulatory texts and automatically populate databases that regulatory reports run on.

If the above streams of efforts had been completely successful, we would have a world of regulators creating regulations using DSL standards. This would be automatically converted to machine executable code, and using smart contracts be executed on a Blockchain. NLP algorithms input data into the reporting data base, which will be ready with the data when the smart contracts were executed. On execution, the reports will be sent from the banks to the regulators in a standardized format.

This would have meant a few Billions in savings for UK banks. On average, UK banks spend £5 Billion per year on regulatory programmes. However, like most pilots, only part of the programme could be terms as successful. Bank’s didn’t have the resources to complete all the above aspects of the pilot successfully. They identified the following drawbacks.

  1. Creating regulatory text in DSL, so that machines can automatically create and execute code, may not be scalable enough for the regulators. Also, if the creation of code is defective, it would be hard to hold someone accountable for error prone reports.
  2. NLP required a lot of human oversight to get to the desired level of accuracy in understanding regulatory texts. So, human intervention is required to convert it to code.
  3. Standardising data elements specific to a regulator was not a viable option, and the costs involved in doing so is prohibitive.
  4. While the pilot had quite a few positive outcomes and learnings, moving from pilot to production would be expensive.

The pilot demonstrated that,

  1. A system where regulators could just change some parameters at their end and re-purpose a report would enable automated regulatory reporting.
  2. Centralizing processes that banks currently carry out locally, create significant efficiencies.
  3. Dramatic reduction in the time and cost of regulatory reporting change.
  4. Using DLT could reduce the amount of data being transferred across parties, and create a secured infrastructure.
  5. When data is standardised into machine readable formats, it removes ambiguity and the need for human interpretation, effectively improving quality of data and the reports.

In a recent article on Robo-Regulators, I highlighted the possibilities of AI taking over the job of a regulator. That was perhaps more radical blue-sky thinking. However, using NLP and DLT to create automated regulatory reporting definitely sounds achievable. Will banks and the regulators be willing to take the next steps in moving to such a system? Watch this space.


Arunkumar Krishnakumar is a Venture Capital investor at Green Shores Capital focusing on Inclusion and a podcast host.

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FB doing a Tencent – Cryptos mainstream adoption in sight?

We have had a record breaking February in the UK weather-wise. One of the days in Feb saw temperatures go up to 21 degrees Celsius. While the cold has returned a little bit, it seems winter is largely done. I get that sense with cryptos, as large institutions one after another are announcing projects, and it only takes one of them to take off for cryptos to go mainstream.

Messaging applications thinking of launching their own cryptos is nothing new. Telegram and Signal have been at it for sometime. However, it is a bigger deal when Facebook looks at introducing cryptocurrency based payments on Whatsapp. The size of the opportunity for Facebook and their partners when the platform is Finteched will undoubtedly get them out of their issues they have faced over the past 24 months.

The Facebook Opportunity

Facebook has two problems to solve, and both potentially powered by Blockchain.
Facebook’s Blockchain team has been spearheaded by former PayPal president David Marcus since last May. In order to replicate Tencent’s successes, they need to leverage the user base of their apps (FB, Whatsapp, Instagram). Bringing payments to Whatsapp would have have been a good starting point, however Facebook’s attempt at doing that in India (the largest Whatsapp) hasn’t gone too well.

About 1 Billion people in India have a mobile, and about 300 Million of them use Whatsapp. Last year, Whatsapp pay launched in a controlled fashion to 1 Million users in India. They used the government backed UPI (Unified Payments Interface), and during the pilot, they achieved about a Million transactions per month. However, the regulators weren’t happy that the payments engine was on Facebook servers. They wanted the servers to be in India, and despite several conversations there is no solution.

The payments market in India is a $1 Trillion market by 2023, and it would be a shame if they missed the bus.

Facebook is looking to create a stablecoin attached to a basket of currencies. There is a team of about 50 people working on this project. If FB planned to use the Indian market as a testing ground for the crypto-powered Whatsapp pay, they may now have to deal with the crypto currency regulatory ban too. However, if they managed to clear the regulatory hurdle, their growth could dwarf the likes of PayTM, and that would just be the start. On top of it, Indian remittance market boomed to $80 Billion last year. If I could use whatsapp to send money to my mom, that would be awesome!!

The other issue that FB has had is around data privacy. With identity management being one of the key concerns, FB saw record number of millennials leave their platform last year. However, with a Blockchain powered Self Sovereign Identity engine, Facebook connect could redefine it’s position with data privacy as a distributed identity management platform.

How decentralised it (the identity engine) will stay if launched is another challenge. Most federated and decentralised identity management engines have ended up creating a centralised monopoly in the past. With Blockchain behind the scenes, one would expect that to be different.

Will Facebook replicate Tencent inspired successes through Whatsapp? Will FB change perceptions through a genuinely decentralised identity engine? Would 2019 be the year of mainstream adoption of cryptos? Watch this space.


Arunkumar Krishnakumar is a Venture Capital investor at Green Shores Capital focusing on Inclusion and a podcast host.

Get fresh daily insights from an amazing team of Fintech thought leaders around the world. Ride the Fintech wave by reading us daily in your email


The law of the fintech jungle is changing

Today when I went out to buy my lunch, nursing a crushing migraine I accidentally pulled out my company debit card to pay for the transaction. Luckily, in my glucose deprived eleventh hour, I realised the grey card was not the orange card, and yelled out to the operator to stop the transaction. Not a great look during the Sydney lunch rush hour, with hungry city workers milling around, eager for me to just get on with buying my lunch so they could.

Of course, if I had of had a Curve card on me today, it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d paid with the incorrect card. The card aggregator startup, who celebrated the first anniversary of their launch across 27 European countries today (must have been a slow fintech news day), would have allowed me to jump into their app right after and take advantage of their Go Back In Time feature. Assuming I’d caught my payments slip-up within 14 days, I could have moved it from one card to another. Bingo.

That’s not the only awesome thing about Curve. Like I link my Amex to my PayPal account to take advantage of collecting Amex points at places PayPal is accepted but not Amex, so to could I have once linked my Amex card to my master Curve card.

I use the past tense, because all of that was possible, until Amex pulled the plug on Curve back in late January.

Curve is understandably upset – you can read the founders impassioned blog here – but it does signal and interesting shift in the innovation/incumbent sands. The point at which banks and payment services become relegated to ‘dumb pipes’ is possibly closer than we think. In the Curve and Amex example, it’s already here.

Curve and Amex aside, the emergence of the money ‘experience’ gives me zero doubt that this will be death by 1000 cuts for incumbents, who despite many murmurings haven’t nailed this one, yet. If you can’t deliver the new contextually relevant, digitally immersive experience, then you don’t understand the new laws of the jungle in finance. This rings true for transactional banking and wealth, just as much as it does for payments.

If you are not experience led, and the only way you can retain your position is by killing off those who are, then you’re playing a very dangerous game that doesn’t end well. Curve may or may not win this battle, but it’s arguable we now have a fairly good insight into how Amex is approaching the war.

Daily Fintech Advisers provides strategic consulting to organizations with business and investment interests in Fintech. Jessica Ellerm is a thought leader specializing in Small Business and the Gig Economy and is the CEO and Co-Founder of Zuper, a new superannuation startup in Australia.

China’s Social Credit Score – Economic Genius or Killer of an open society?

I am in the London underground, and my mobile tells me if the person sitting next to me has defaulted on their loans. I can now decide if I still want to sit next to them. – Imagine a world where that could be true

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I am trying to book a Eurostar holiday, and I get told on their site that, I can’t travel on Eurostar because I missed my credit card payment last week – Imagine a world where that could be true.

I walk into a Starbucks and I get a free drink because my mortgage payment was done on time – thanks to my direct debit. I could go on, but you get the idea.

China is working on a Social Credit Scoring system that could pretty much make life look like what I have described. For me, it’s too intrusive. But in a world (within China) where Google has a single digit market share, thanks to censorship, nothing is intrusive (looks like).

The Chinese government claims that it needs the system to promote social and economic trust, and plans to launch the system by 2020. No wonder, China tops the world in AI patents. They are already piloting the system in several Chinese cities.

“allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”


– From the founding document of the social credit scoring system

The government’s drive to get the social credit score underway is largely inspired by existing private setups like Sesame credit. Sesame credit is the credit system created by Ant Financial. Ant financial and Tencent have managed to create a universe of consumer data through their ecommerce and messaging offerings. And they leveraged that data to provide a wide suite of financial services. The worrying aspect is that the government’s credit scoring initiative may tap into this data.

Economists highlight that China’s growth, at least when compared to its neighbour India, has slowed down. It may not mean much at this point as China’s economy is almost 4 times bigger. But the slowest growth rate in 30 years is something that has got the government thinking.

South East Asian countries like South Korea struggled to transition from input based growth to productivity based growth. In China’s case, the labour force has maxed out, and now they are focused on driving productivity. Is this social score system designed to make people more productive?

In a survey conducted last year by a European researcher, 80% of the respondents voted in favour of this system. The challenge is that the social credit scoring system has a good chance of making the rich – richer and the poor – poorer. Getting on the economic ladder would be harder for the bottom of the pyramid. However the Chinese government chooses to look at it differently.

Keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful

Just that line sounds so binary and feels mutually exclusive and is an antithesis of an open society. Then there is this philosophical argument of what’s more important? An egalitarian society where privacy is respected, or an ethical, moral, compliant and conformed world. There is no binary answer to that either.

Only time will tell if this system delivers the desired outcome – at least in a Chinese sense. Watch this space.

The Return of Crypto DeQuorum – JPMCoin the XRP Killer

After a busy day, I sat down to have a late lunch at 3 PM on Thursday, and I saw a Whatsapp message pop up – and I stood up from my chair saying “Ohhh Ehhmmm Geee”. That was my reaction when I heard about the news of the JPM Coin. Of all the banks, JP Morgan led by Jamie Dimon had to be the first mover to launch their asset backed crypto. It is less than 2 years since Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a big fraud.

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Will this bring back some decorum into the crypto world? Will this kill Ripple’s XRP? My head is abuzz with all these questions, so bear with me as I manage/struggle to lay them out.

The crypto world can do with some positive news and sanity as there is a sense of the crypto winter coming to an end. As much as I loved to hear the news, and was glad for the crypto industry as a whole, I felt for some of the early adopters of the technology. There is a good chance that we will see a BarcCoin, CitiCoin, GSCoin, and so on, with similar working models. There is more than a chance that we will see some existing players disappear. Let us quickly visit the salient features of the JPM Coin model.

  • It will use the Quorum Blockchain developed by JPM. It provides for
    high speed and high throughput processing of private transactions within a permissioned group of known participants
  • It will be a stable coin, whose value will be always $1 USD – so market volatility linked with Cryptos is mitigated.
  • It will be used for wholesale payments that JP Morgan processes, estimated at ~$6 Trillion per day.
  • The network can be a private or even a centralised network permissioned by JPM.

With real time cross border B2B payments as the core use case, JPM Coin may create some challenges for Swift. Last year, Swift announced that its GPI technology that has had good feedback from its banking customers.
GPI technology that let banks see where their payments were at all times, and that came with rules around response and confirmation times.

However, the challenge for the newcomers (then) that kept Swift going was the mutual KYC requirement from the regulators, which was harder using a DLT payment mode. And GPI let banks see where their money was at all times. Assume a London based bank is sending money to a bank in Mumbai, there may be a couple of correspondent banks in between. The London bank can see where the money is, and stay on top of any delays, issues etc., They can also stay on top of the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that the intermediaries offer.

With a crypto based approach, the transfer will be instantaneous without any need for correspondent banks as long as regulatory and relationship hurdles are overcome.

Ripple and XRP have had their challenges in gaining adoption from key banking players. One of the key reasons why cryptocurrencies couldn’t be used for cross border B2B payments is because of the market volatility of the cryptos. With a stablecoin like JPM Coin, that fundamental issue has been addressed.

Also, with the banking and corporate relationships that JPM commands, most of their counterparties would be better off being part of the network. The JPM’s interbank network has about 157 global banks, and adoption should be pretty quick once the piloting is successful. Although the underlying Quorum blockchain is based on Ethereum, it offers both private and public transactions capabilities. So banks and corporates on the network will have privacy if they choose/need it.

However, the real pain hits them (corporates) when a bunch of tier 1 banks launch their own stable coins. This space has just started to get interesting, and we should see an avalanche of similar offerings from global banks.


Arunkumar Krishnakumar is a Venture Capital investor at Green Shores Capital focusing on Inclusion and a podcast host.

Get fresh daily insights from an amazing team of Fintech thought leaders around the world. Ride the Fintech wave by reading us daily in your email


Open banking – Keep calm and saddle up for a five year run

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A year on – and that’s a big milestone for many. But in the legacy banking world, nothing gets done in a year. And it’s not surprising that open banking has been more of an introvert than we expected. Eventful or not, open banking is one of the best things that could have happened to consumers, and will eventually turn out to be a case study for other global economies to learn from.

Open banking is not just a movement to get banks to relinquish their ownership of consumer data. It is more of a data revolution to identify consumer behaviour and use data analytics to provide personalised services – not just banking services.

There are multiple stakeholders involved in the process of making the most of this data revolution. Getting a consolidated view of a customer’s financial products is perhaps a low hanging fruit.

For a consumer focused data driven use case, that is more integrated into their lifestyle, more work needs to be done on open banking data.

  • Downstream apps need to build their interfaces with banks that have opened up their APIs.
  • That will be followed by proprietary intelligence that these downstream apps will add.
  • Proprietary intelligence using machine learning, predictive analytics etc., need critical mass of data – which only builds over time. For this these firms will also need to onboard customers.
  • Customer onboarding is easily said than done – comes with serious cost of acquisition for a small firm – that happens when they have backing such initiatives from Venture capital.

Every step above takes time. It would be a few years before a real data driven use case can reach the customer and for us to start seeing some success stories. But where are banks largely, and where are the startups in the journey?

A year ago the Competitions and Market Authority (CMA) set the pace for a bunch of banks (9 of them) to open up customer data through APIs. And 12 months on, there is more noise about a lack of noise in this space. I don’t believe there is any action missing, and this is why.

Banks had to open up customer transaction data through APIs – but CMA only came up with this idea in 2016. For banks to get it, plan it, and execute the APIs within even 24 months was always an aggressive timeline. HSBC’s Connected Money app was perhaps an exception to the usual pace of banks. Barclays seems to have a similar capability as well.

However, the integration that legacy Banks have provided to downstream systems are not the most intuitive. APIs exposed by banks use apps like Yodlee (who create the plumbing for the data) who then integrate to downstream customer facing apps like Money Dashboard for example.

One quick look at the apps show that the the experience offered by legacy banks to integrate into a customer facing app are so outdated. Especially for a customer segment that are used to a frictionless Monzo like experience. That is an area where banks can definitely do better. However, most Millennials and Generation Z customers directly bank with neo-banks, so this will be less of an issue with that customer segment.

Startups are still building the intelligence to make the most of the data revolution. However, most firms that I know of that are looking to provide PFM services, lending (underwriting, brokering or credit scoring), SME loyalty, or simply cleverer product switching, are all focused on growing their customer base in search of more data volumes.

Most of the clever applications need machine learning algorithms to feed on a lot of high quality customer data. That is when their results get accurate as the machine learns from continuous feedback. Releasing half trained machine learning apps to consumers can actually result in poor customer experience and churn.

Most firms I speak to, are focused on identifying product market fit for their data driven use case this year.

Customer acquisition has to be cleverly managed to ensure there is growth in data volumes, but also the predictive analytics is accurate enough to cut down churn. Its a hard game to play.

In a recent interview Tom Blomfield, CEO of Monzo mentioned that he wasn’t afraid of legacy banks or even the Neo-banks. But he was wary of new open banking powered apps just bringing clever capabilities and acquiring customers to dwarf the likes of Monzo. Open banking will be a slow burner, it would have failed if we didn’t see some success stories in the next 5 years.


Arunkumar Krishnakumar is a Venture Capital investor at Green Shores Capital focusing on Inclusion and a podcast host.

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