The Paradox of Dreams and Debt: Unveiling Economic Realities

Dreams and Debt – This article is an extract from my upcoming book (title withheld until public launch) focused on Money and Games of Money and focused on my own assumptions, experience, and understanding, driven purely from the perspective of my ability to correlate the offerings and reasoning behind the offerings and reasoning behind the various governments of different countries where immigration services for residentship, passport, and nationality promises are made based upon the capacity to make huge and significant investments in the country.

Financial Game OR Trap – Outlook

But the same destination with an offer (Excellent or Good Life) on the table and the corner of the same table at an angle of declination from your offer position confuses me too much. Is there a possibility to support and try to reduce these angles running down by adding a flavor of mobile payments, cross-border remittances, and electronic payments, and giving freedom from cash and real currency?

It’s important to study the facts of offerings, but if you’re presented with a real opportunity, don’t risk losing it by taking your time. At the same time, complete due diligence is also needed before any such big commitment.

Generally, it is said, “Don’t aim for success if you want it; just do what you love and believe in, and it will come naturally.” I laugh at this in our current time and situations, and as per my thought process, it might have been true during the Stone Age, but in today’s lightning speed age, my thoughts are like this: “If you don’t aim for success, you have already accepted the failure.

You can afford only one plan, Plan A; otherwise, there is a very long list of failures. Remember, we have 26 letters in the alphabet. After Plan A, Plan B, then Plan C, up to Plan Z, success will never come to you (just a thought; ignore if you don’t agree).

Back to our main topic: why do we get such big dreams wrapped in colourful and glittery wrappers with the best perfume smell? This article identifies a few countries in dire straits and the problems they face, but when it comes to dream sellers, they are on the top seller list (I can’t say how many buyers are there).

Why Do We Get So Many Offers ?

Why are most countries in serious trouble or on the path to falling into a financial pit the only ones or mostly on the list of dream sellers for the best, excellent, and luxurious life? In recent times (even though this is still on), the media has done a more than adequate job of covering the futile dance between the Eurozone “leaders” and Greece.

However, Greece is not the only country facing fundamental economic challenges. The southern slice of Europe—France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece—should unilaterally reschedule their sovereign debt obligations to provide their economies with room to breathe and blow much more funding into promoting economic growth instead of savaging their economies with “austerity” policies that kill economic growth.

Austerity has never produced anything but austerity. It is the enemy of the kind of growth these countries need in order to get their sovereign debt under control. A friend of mine from Denmark told me an interesting story about before the euro age: “That euro would be implemented at a 2 Dmark/euro ratio. That may have been true for our wages, but the real story is that after the euro got its feet on the ground, prices looked different. A beer that cost 2 Danish marks almost immediately cost 2 euros. 100% price inflation overnight”.

Is there a direct relation between two things, i.e., offering an excellent life in an easy way or by just putting a few million dollars into the country of destination and locking for 3-5 years without any interest gain, and on the other hand, the same country is under huge debts from foreign investors who are looking for their money? In the main story, we will see how we can blend mobile payments with cross-border remittances (another form of mobile payments and receivables).

Banks With Dry Reserves (Financial Game)

Nobody has forgotten the name Laiki. Laiki was a failed bank at the heart of the financial woes of the EU’s most easterly island. Yet things have changed more radically behind the scenes in banking and political circles. For a start, Laiki’s business was transferred to the larger Bank of Cyprus, which is getting to grips with its daunting financial legacy. If they had had easy access to mobile payments and financial services locally available in the country in a closed loop and a strong presence and motivation for local industries to produce goods to be consumed internally, the scene would have been different. Remittance services on the Mobile Wallet interface would have given it’s economy great shape and a strong background.

There are many countries whose GDP is supported by cross-border remittances (more than 40% of total income in a country comes through remittances). Every year, migrants send hundreds of billions of dollars worth of remittances back to friends and family in their home country. There’s a massive industry that facilitates these payments, and it has for more than a century.

In today’s time, along with huge portfolios of methods of payment and sending and receiving money, security is getting tighter as well. Fingerprints, facial recognition, and selfies with smiles are getting trialed for use at ATMs. Using the solution, by simply scanning their finger, customers can access their online bank accounts and authorize payments within seconds (a few countries and banks have made it public or employee-only) without the need for PINs, passwords, or authentication codes.

Mobile financial services operators must ensure customer protection by operating in accordance with the rules set out in the central bank guidelines, within the principles of transparency, responsible pricing, fair and respectful treatment of clients, and within the mechanisms for complaint resolution.

Mobile money, apart from extending financial services to the poor, is also expected to improve productivity by increasing efficiencies, lowering the cost of transactions, improving security, generating new employment opportunities, and creating a platform on which other businesses could grow. The government’s adoption of mobile money could improve its ability to monitor financial flows and reduce illicit activities; the use of mobile money in salary disbursements could also be an enormous driver of service throughout the economy as a whole.

The government’s support through policy direction, especially in the area of tax holidays, would significantly promote the growth of mobile wallet transactions and, for that matter, freedom from cash, i.e., cashless payments. The potential benefits of mobile payments are great, and we appealed for support in the development of applications that could make the use of the Mobile Money platform easier, more efficient, and more effective.

Digital Money – Saviour For Failed Economies

Although the number of people adopting mPayment has significantly increased in recent years, it will take some time before it becomes standard practice. Samsung announced the arrival of Samsung Pay at a recent New York event where it also introduced its latest flagship devices, the Galaxy S6 edge+ and Galaxy Note5. JK Shin, CEO and Head of IT and Mobile Communications Division at Samsung Electronics, has revealed that the launch of these cutting-edge smartphones will usher in a new age of mobile payment. Samsung has taken a bold move in order to improve our mobile experience.

It is easy, safe, and most importantly, available virtually anywhere you can swipe a card, in most cases without new costs for merchants, from day one.” For online payments from the banking domain, which are simple, innovative, and cost-effective, a solution has to help improve the security of online banking transactions, protect online banking solutions against malicious attacks, provide an identity management feature, and enhance the user experience.

The good news is that mobile payment players are constantly looking to boost security. Google was one of the first to implement HCE (Host Card Emulation), which would allow an app on the phone to perform card emulation on the NFC without having to rely on secure elements; others like VISA and MasterCard are following suit.

However, the whole point of HCE is that the data (card details) is stored in the cloud instead of on the user’s device, and that poses another challenge. We all know the cloud isn’t entirely secure either, don’t we? And that’s where other techniques like tokenization come into play—it substitutes sensitive data with a token or a proxy, which makes no sense to anybody or anything except for the authorized interface that requested the token.

For more details on cloud based solution https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cloud-based-mobile-financial-services-payments-vinod-sharma

Evolution of Financial Payment System

The evolution of financial payment systems has been a long but interesting journey characterized by sudden changes in underlying technology. Financial payments and banking started in a very inefficient and traditional way, which was slow but still acceptable to the customers due to the stage of the information age. Initially, almost all the fun and joy in terms of one double zero percent in the shape of activities in the financial services (except non-banking services) space was attributable to banks, with all the revenue being collected by the same entities.

With advancements in technology, organizations outside the banking industry diversified into financial services, targeting margins in the space. These were organizations servicing millions of customers through broad distribution channels, be they mobile operators, retailers, or online merchants.

The legacy remittance industry has long been dominated by cash, which requires physical locations where customers can hand over or pick up money. Building out those retail networks is a huge investment. It’s left just a few players, called money transfer agents, controlling the bulk of the industry. But these companies’ comfortable hold on the industry is now being challenged by digital remittance startups and mobile-based cross-border remittances.

Food For Thought

Digital-first remittance companies and mobile network operators are in competition for offering convenient services such as 24/7 accessibility from any location, value-added features such as bill payments and mobile payments, as well as fees. They aim to take advantage of the changing preferences of individuals due to the rise of digital and mobile platforms and enhance usability. This aligns with the world’s transition towards a cashless economy.

Their money or savings were taken away and used to finance the shutdown of a bank and support other banks. The measure referred to as a “haircut” can exacerbate the issue in an unfavorable manner. MFS offers an effective means to prevent hastily crafted plans that intend to channel substantial amounts of money into offshore accounts.

By the year 2020, it is anticipated that mobile payments will surpass the 3 trillion euro mark. Mobile money is set to save several African nations roughly 2 billion USD, and it has evolved from being merely a cash in/out process through agents or peer-to-peer money transfers. Africa has introduced a revolutionary and rapid new dimension to mobile money, where individuals can receive funds from various locations worldwide within seconds and enjoy 24/7 access to wallet transfers, merchant payments, loan services, insurance payments, and more. An ongoing and interminable narrative.

Banks should take a back seat as clerks for reconciliations and accounting units, and regulators should allow MFS companies to innovate, bring new solutions and products in no time, and make customers lives easy, less costly, and much faster. See my post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-banks-never-successful-mobile-money-payments-vinod-sharma

Conclusions: Respectfully, embarking on an unfamiliar journey devoid of guidance or direction is akin to aimlessly floundering and frequently leads to calamity. From my personal experience, I have participated in programs aimed at enhancing my expertise in situations such as cross-border remittances through mobile payments or mobile wallets, which have brought significant support to the economies of various countries. I have witnessed that in desperate times, countries like Greece, Cyprus, and Italy had to succumb to rescue terms that adversely affected not only bank bondholders and shareholders but also numerous private deposit holders. This situation highlights the effectiveness and reliability of mobile payments, or mobile wallets, in contributing to the economic stability of countries.

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Points to Note:

it’s time to figure out when to use which tech—a tricky decision that can really only be tackled with a combination of experience and the type of problem in hand. So if you think you’ve got the right answer, take a bow and collect your credits! And don’t worry if you don’t get it right.

Feedback & Further Questions

Do you have any burning questions about Big Data, “AI & ML“, Blockchain, FinTech,Theoretical PhysicsPhotography or Fujifilm(SLRs or Lenses)? Please feel free to ask your question either by leaving a comment or by sending me an email. I will do my best to quench your curiosity.

Books & Other Material referred

• AILabPage (group of self-taught engineers/learners) members’ hands-on field work is being written here.
• Referred online materiel, live conferences and books (if available)