Ketharaman Swaminathan Founder and CEO at GTM360 Marketing Solutions
Like startups in any other industry, fintechs need to find a problem to solve, develop a solution, package it in such a way that it provides a compelling reason to use, and thereby gain mainstream adoption. SQUARE and PayZapp are two fintechs that have a good job of this for reasons I’ve covered in my previous blog posts here and here. This requir...
31 July 2016 /regulation /startups
My property management company in UK wanted me to link the following information to my monthly rent payment: MCS MERIDIAN CLIENT ACCOUNT HOUSE RENT 98 MERIDIAN PLACE JUN 2008 There was no way I could do this electronically since the maximum info I could squeeze through in the reference field of my Online Banking's fund transfer screen was only MCS ...
05 July 2016 /payments /retail
Ever since I got my first credit card in the late '80s, I’ve been a fan of plastic. Rewards, deferred payment and a built-in line of defence from fraud - these are some of the reasons I pay with credit cards as far as possible. That said, during the same period, I’ve come across many people who're wary of using credit cards. When I ask them, they g...
26 May 2016 /retail
Following Chipotle’s e-coli scare late last year, the burrito chain’s stock has been on a free fall. From a peak of ~$750 in October 2015, the stock price plummeted to ~$400 at the height of the crisis last month. At the time, it was rumored that the company might be forced to file for bankruptcy. Whether the rumor is true or not, banks will know ...
17 April 2016 /retail
They said cash is costly. It didn't work with merchants. They launched one mobile wallet after the other to drive cashless behavior. It didn't work with consumers. They scared people away from currency notes, claiming they contain all kinds of germs, bacteria and viruses. It didn't work with anyone. 85% of world’s transactions happen in cash. Sour...
16 March 2016 /retail
I drafted this blog post four years ago after reading this article in Economic Times. Not wanting to sound alarmist, I decided to can it. I revisited the post many times since then and I stuck to my decision each time. Until I read this question on Quora a couple of days ago: Is there a situation in India like The Big Short movie as there are bi...
29 February 2016 /regulation /wholesale
In his blog post titled The Power of Location-Based Offers in Financial Services, Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand, highlights how banks can leverage the proliferation of smartphones to make location based offers for cross-selling of banking and other third-party products at their branches. Let’s say a bank implements LBOs and an ex...
21 February 2016 /retail
A few months ago, I'd posted the following update on social media: Privacy does not equal Security: Privacy is refusing to give out your mobile #. Security is refusing to give out your debit card PIN #. To which a friend had replied, "You made it so simple!!" Then I thought of bank account numbers and realized it wasn't so simple. If I to...
17 January 2016 /regulation /retail
As a tech marketer, I constantly preach that technology must solve a real-life problem for it to enter the mainstream. I also believe that it's the technology provider's job to explicitly convey how their product or service alleviates concrete pain areas. In the context of analytics, this would mean that analytics is useful as long as you know what...
06 December 2015
They say every product or service must have a secret sauce. Some startups take the secrecy part of this advice to the extreme by going into stealth mode until they launch. While others point to today’s open world of startup events, mentoring sessions, Twitter and TED talks and question if it’s even possible to have anything secret. Before sharing ...
17 November 2015
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