Reimagining the Future of Finance

whitePaper | April 14, 2022

The expectations today's customers have towards personalized digital banking are directly impacted by their experience across other industries such as eCommerce, healthcare, gaming, retail, etc. This is particularly true across emerging markets in Africa, such as Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, and Egypt, where increased mobile penetration has created an obsession among customers for customized digital experiences, forcing institutions to align their offerings towards this trend.

whitePaper | May 20, 2022

They shape how people spend and save and many of their daily interactions. With the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the value of digital payments for individuals and businesses became even more apparent. In Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) digital payments emerged as the preferred method of purchase: e-commerce grew 18% in 2020.

whitePaper | August 25, 2022

This paper studies the economics behind the investment in information technologies (IT) by U.S. commercial banks in the past decade. By linking banks’, IT spending to their lending technologies, we analyze the distinctive natures of banks’ dealings with information across various lending activities. Investment in communication IT is shown to be associated more with improving banks’ ability of soft information production and transmission, while investment in software IT helps enhance banks’ hard information processing capacity. We exploit polices that affect geographic regions differentially to show causally that banks respond to an increased demand for small business credit (mortgage refinance) by increasing their spending on communication (software) IT spending. We also find that the entry of fintech induces commercial banks to increase their investment in IT—more so in the software IT category.

whitePaper | February 23, 2022

The race for European banks to offer Instant Payments (IP) is more urgent than ever before. COVID-19 has piled on the pressure to adopt: throughout 2020, the average daily SCT Instant transaction volume more than doubled due to new purchase behavior. In addition, by November 2021 European banks that are TARGET2 direct participants are also mandated to be TIPS reachable – one of the two major SEPA instant CSMs.

whitePaper | January 1, 2023

The workforce challenges which have persisted throughout 2022 remain a primary concern heading into 2023. Inflation, tightening budgets, a renewed focus on profitability, and a tight labor market make productivity measurement and capacity utilization paramount.

whitePaper | January 19, 2023

Privacy is regarded as a crucial factor in the investigation and development of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) and is therefore thoroughly researched by monetary authorities, academia, and the private sector. Academic research indicates that CBDC transactions may involve processing significant amounts of identity and transaction-related information (Lee et al., 2021), raising privacy concerns for future users. While there exist countless definitions for privacy, such as “the right to be left alone” (Warren and Brandeis, 1890), in this document, the definition of Nissenbaum (2010) - “the appropriate flow of information” - will be followed.