Jeremy Light Co-founder at Fourdotzero
A year ago, I believed UK Open Banking payments were on a roll. Total payment initiations for 2022 were 68 million payments, an increase of 171% over 2021, showing a strong foundation for Open Banking. At this rate, I believed 1bn payments a year could be reached in 2025, a level where Open Banking would be firmly established in the UK payments la...
09 January 2024 /payments /predictions Open Banking
There is much written about CBDCs but little on the risks to society a CBDC would create. I see these risks falling into three categories: 1. economic 2. financial 3. human rights Economic Risks The key economic risk is inflation. A CBDC can be created at the press of a button and distributed widely, inflating the money supply without any correspon...
17 January 2022 /payments /crypto Blockchain in Banking and Financial Services
Bitcoin at 50k USD In March 2018 I posted a Finextra blog “Bitcoin at 50,000 USD”. It was framed as a scenario rather than a prediction and I observed that no-one could possibly know with any certainty what would happen next with Bitcoin. However, the objective of the blog was to examine what Bitcoin and the crypto landscape would look like should...
18 February 2021 /payments /crypto Blockchain in Banking and Financial Services
1230 words, 4:50 min read An Orwellian Dystopia As more and more payments become digital, a key question for payment systems architects is how to preserve the privacy of their users. Without privacy, payments systems risk becoming surveillance systems for government agencies and for corporations. In turn these can be extended into control systems ...
29 September 2020 /payments /regulation The Payments Business
1200 words, 4.5 minute read Central bank balance sheets are ballooning the world over, and in parallel, adoption of shared ledgers using blockchain is accelerating. These major shifts indicate the global architecture for money and payments is on the cusp of structural change. Blockchain analysis and debate are dominated by a focus on cryptocurrenci...
08 September 2020 /payments /crypto Blockchain in Banking and Financial Services
770 words, 3 minute read The Wirecard debacle has hit the headlines with a vengeance, begging the question: flawed regulation or flawed Fintech models? On first appearance, it feels like that there is a regulatory problem. However, it looks like this is an old fashioned accounting fraud, that just happens to be with a payments processor. The missin...
06 July 2020 /payments /regulation Fintech
(560 words 2 min 30s read) In November 2019 I blogged about how programmable value is the future of financial services. However, it is evident from reactions I have had that the concept and implications of programmable value can be difficult to grasp. A clearer explanation is needed, so here goes. Digital money is widespread in mobile and online ba...
04 February 2020 /payments Blockchain Observations
The Original Premiere – The Dot.com Boom Remember the dot.com boom? You need to be over 40 to have direct experience of it from the start, so here’s a recap. It began in the mid-90s with the realisation that the internet was here to stay and a game changer in the way we live and work; leading to a frenzy of start-up companies with new business mode...
13 January 2020 Banking Strategy, Digital and Transformation
About 3% of the money supply in the UK is made up of physical notes, the rest is electronic money held on computer systems. Globally, about 8% of the world’s money is cash, 92% is electronic.* With the advent of crypto-currencies – also known as digital assets, virtual currencies, or digital currencies, many, especially older bankers still think cr...
04 November 2019 /payments Blockchain Observations
Domestic Payment Interoperability – A Fading Prospect Cross-border interoperability of domestic real-time payments systems was a hot topic a few years ago, but seems to have gone off the boil – possibly due to the reality of bedding in new real-time payments systems and the challenges of domestic adoption – from the USA, to Europe, to Asia to Aust...
09 April 2019 /payments Innovation in Financial Services
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