Weekly Market Commentary – Week Ending 07/10/11 OVERVIEW The Bank of England finally caved in under the pressure of a faltering UK economy and increased its quantitative easing program on Thursday by a further £75bln, taking the total they have injected into the UK economy to £275bln. The “printing of money” is something that George [...]

OVERVIEW All eyes this week were clearly focused again on the ever mounting Euro debt Crisis and the challenges the Euro zone faces over Greece. Earlier in the week cracks seemed to be appearing in the shaky consensus around rescue efforts for the euro zone and about how much money should be set aside to [...]

NB:  hyperWALLET has been processing payments in the England and Europe for over 5 years, but we’ve recently expanded our (human) footprint in the UK, too.  Our team in London now has both sales and Foreign exchange trading expertise, to better serve our global corporate customers.  Nigel Green is the former Head of Corporate Dealing at Travelex, [...]

Over the past decade, United Nations resolutions and domestic equivalents designed to combat crime and terrorism have imposed an increasing operational burden on the financial services industry.  Sanctioned Individual and Sanction Entity list screening have become a standard operational protocol at financial institutions and money services companies. Financial Institutions rely on proprietary datasets drawn from [...]

Are you familiar with the buzz around workers’ remittances? Prominent institutions such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Dialogue and even Swift have devoted significant resources to studying workers’ remittances. Why all the commotion?  The attention?  The effort? First, remittances are important.  Countless people around the world rely on remittances for clothing, food and shelter.  [...]

Also a final whine about TD declining my card. Canada rolled out chip+pin for our national debit scheme in 2010 and we’ve all just about gotten the hang of it at the POS now, even cranially-challenged consumers like me. chiping+Pining debit purchases wasn’t a huge leap since Canadians have been swiping+PINing our debit cards for [...]

According to the CIA Factbook, the world’s 2010 GDP is estimated at 75 Trillion dollars. According to the Boston Consulting group, the global payments industry is approaching 500B in revenue. According to my math, this implies that payments industry’s revenues alone represents a 0.67% tax on human effort.               If payments [...]

In November 2010 hyperWALLET launched an SMS-based remittance service called hyperREMIT for the Canada–>Philippines corridor that I’m really excited about. I’m excited about it for a number of reasons: 1) The fee model is good for the world. The total cost to send $200 is $8. That includes the fixed $6 fee and 1% fx [...]

The world is still a big place and thankfully we’re not all the same (yet). I was recently in Singapore where there are some unique cross-border trade challenges for payment service providers, but this entry is an update from the last stop on my trip: Australia.  Just last week it was publicly reported that there [...]

Why Such long long faces, payments peoples? I’ve been reading some January ‘Predictions for 2011′ payments blogs and the general vibe is not overly optimistic.  Tom Noyes at FinVentures  notes a “tough start” for mobile payments, citing service discontinuations (Firethorn) and CEO succession (Obopay) on the back of disappointing revenue growth and inscrutable value props. [...]