Ketharaman Swaminathan Founder and CEO at GTM360 Marketing Solutions
I first heard the meme "Banks privatize profits and socialize losses" soon after some banks were bailed out during the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-8 in USA. The narrative was, when banks do well, they distribute their profits to their employees and shareholders whereas when they do badly, they palm off their losses to taxpayers who res...
02 May 2023 /regulation /retail
Limitation in field length of payment messages causes endless number of problems in electronic payments. Let me give a few examples: I was unable to fit the payee name MCS MERIDIAN CLIENT ACCOUNT HOUSE RENT 98 MERIDIAN PLACE JUN 2008 in the payee field of my bank's payment screen. My bank told me to change it to MCS MERIDIAN CLI. I wasn't sure if ...
17 April 2023 /payments /predictions
A few years ago, I'd visited the South Indian temple town of Tirupati with my family. On the way, whenever the train stopped at a station, the engine was switched off. But the air-conditioning still worked because it was powered by huge battery packs installed in the AC coach. Coincidentally, the manufacturer of these battery packs is located clos...
01 March 2023 /cloud /devops
(This is a commentary on how shortselling works and not a guide to carry out shortselling.) I recently posted the following update on social media: @s_ketharaman: Startup Idea: Hindenburg Research of India. Conduct research in India. Launch hit jobs on foreign companies. 10% of large publicly traded firms in USA allegedly commit securities fraud,...
16 February 2023 /markets /crime
In his ET WEALTH column entitled If it seems too good to be true, it probably is, Dhirendra Kumar describes the following asymmetry between victims and perpetrators of cybercrime: "Individual victims - even when they are well-off and educated - are poorly equipped to detect fraud. The fraudsters are invariably well-experienced at what they're...
01 December 2022 /payments /crime
There's a lot of buzz around cybercrime. Not a week goes by when we don't hear of someone or the other losing money to scammers and fraudsters via UPI / Zelle et al. Let's consider the following ubiquituous cybercrime described in Why Is It So Hard To Catch Cybercriminals?. "Joe uses UPI to buy something from Jane, and does not get what he ord...
27 October 2022 /payments /crime
We took the following example of a cybercrime in Why Is It Hard To Catch Cybercriminals? Joe uses a digital payment to buy something from Jane, and does not get what he ordered. In this context, digital payment is any A2A RTP like UPI (India), FPS (UK) or Zelle (USA). (For the uninitiated, A2A RTP stands for Account-to-Account Real Time Payment, w...
07 September 2022 /payments /crime
In the traditional Onprem software paradigm, a Customer pays the full License Fee of the software upfront and gets the rights to use the software in perpetuity. If he wants maintenance and updates, he additionally pays AMC every year, which is typically 18-22% of the LF. Upgrades are charged separately, as and when they're available. In the modern...
23 August 2022 /cloud /crypto
When the authorities say cash leads to tax evasion, counterfeiting, etc., the common man ("Joe") thinks it's because cash is anonymous. When they goad him to ditch cash and move to digital payments, Joe assumes that digital payment will eliminate fraud because it's not anonymous. Then, one day, Joe uses a digital payment like UPI to buy ...
11 August 2022 /payments /crime
I’ve been asked many times to share my take on the latest status of Rakuten Coin, an altcoin that I wrote about in How Blockchain Can Crack The Holy Grail Of Loyalty Programs four years ago. That is not strictly true. I’ve been asked only once, by a certain @droskill on Twitter. The Rakuten coin was launched in 2018 - but I can find a single mentio...
06 June 2022 /startups /crypto
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