Live the Best Life – Financial Game OR Trap

Abstract – This article is an extract from my upcoming book (title withheld until public launch) focused on Money & Games of Money and focused on my own assumptions, experience, understanding and driven purely from the prospective of my ability to correlate the offerings and reasoning behind by 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. But the same destination with offer (Excellent or Good Life) on table and the corner of same table are in the angle of declination from your offer position confuse me too much. Is there a possibility to support and try to reduce these angle running down by adding a flavour of Mobile Payments, Cross Border remittances, 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” and I laugh J at this in our current time and situations and as per my thought process it might be true during 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 1 plan, Plan A other wise there is 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 so success will never come to you (Just a thought, ignore if you don’t agree :).

Back to our main topic why we get such big dreams wrapped in colourful & glittery wrappers with best perfume smell. This article identifies few countries in the most dire straits and the problems they face but when it comes to Dream Sellers they are in top seller list (Cant say how many buyers are there).

Introduction – Why most of the countries, which are in serious trouble or on the path to fall in financial pit are the only or mostly in the list of dream sellers for best life, excellent life and luxurious life. In recent time (even this is still on) media is doing a more than adequate job of covering the futile dance between the Eurozone “leaders” and Greece. But Greece is not the only country facing fundamental economic challenges. Southern slice of Europe- France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, should unilaterally reschedule their sovereign debt obligations, to provide their economies room to breathe, and plow much more funding into promoting economic growth; instead of savaging their economies with “austerity” policies which 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 in hand. A friend of mine from Denmark told me interesting story about before euro age “That euro would be implemented at a 2 Dmark / euro ratio… that may have been true for our wages and real story after Euro got the feet on ground prices looked different. A beer that cost 2 Dmark almost immediately cost 2 Euros. 100% price inflation overnight”.

Is there a direct relation in 2 things i.e offering excellent life in an easy way or by just putting few million dollars into country of destination and locking for 3-5 years without any interest gain and on other hand same country is under huge debts from foreign investors who are looking for their money. Now in main story we will see how we can blend Mobile Payments, Cross Border remittances (Another form of Mobile Payments & Receivables)

Main Story  – Nobody has forgotten the name of 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 easy access to Mobile Payments and financial services locally available in the country in closed loop and strong presence and motivation for local industries to produce goods to be consumed internally, scene would have been different. Remittance services on Mobile Wallet interface would have given great shape and strong background to its economy.

There are many countries whose GDP is supported by cross border remittances (More than 40% of total Income in 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 has for more than a century. In todays time along with very huge portfolios of methods of payments and send/receive money security is getting tighten as well. Finger prints, facial recognition, selfie with smile getting under trial to for use ATM, using the solution, by simply scanning their finger, customers can access their online bank accounts and authorise payments within seconds (Few countries and banks made it public/employee) without the need for PINs, passwords or authentication codes.

Mobile Financial Services Operators to ensure customer protection by operating in accordance with the rules set out in the central banks guidelines and 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. Government’s adoption of Mobile Money could improve its ability to monitor financial flows and reduce illicit activities; use of Mobile Money in salary disbursements could also be an enormous driver of the service throughout the economy as a whole.

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 and its potential of the benefits of Mobile Payments are great and appealed for support in the development of applications that could make the use of the Mobile Money platform easier and more efficient, and effective.

The sheer volume of users embracing mPayment has exponentially grown over the past couple of years, but it will be a while before it becomes a norm. Now Samsung Pay is coming; at a Samsung event in New York where it unveiled its newest flagship devices – the Galaxy S6 edge+ and Galaxy Note5, JK Shin, CEO and Head of IT & Mobile Communications Division at Samsung Electronics said, “With the launch of these exciting new smartphones, we will open a new era of mobile payment. This is Samsung’s brave step forward to enhance 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 banking domain, which is simple, innovative, and cost-effective; solution has to help to improve the security of online banking transactions, Protect online banking solutions against malicious attacks, provide an identity management feature and Enhance 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 till 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 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 authorised interface which requested the token.

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

The evolution of financial payment systems has been a long but interesting journey characterised 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 in the information age. Initially, almost all the fun and joy in terms one double zero percent in 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 advancement in technology, organisations outside the banking industry diversified into financial services targeting margins in the space. These were organisations servicing millions of customers through broad distribution channels, be they mobile operators, retailers or on-line merchants. The legacy remittance industry has been long 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 a bulk of the industry.  But these companies’ comfortable hold on the industry is now being challenged by digital remittance startups & Mobile based cross border remittances.

Mobile Network Operators & Digital-first remittance companies are competing on fees, 24 hour access from any where to any where, other value added services like making mobile payments and bill payments other then just cash out (Step towards cash free world) and usability, and capitalising on the way people’s expectations have changed with the advent of digital and mobile channels.

Conclusions: With due respect, running on an unknown path without a roadmap or direction is running like a headless chicken often result in disasters. I personally have seen and taken part in programs to build my experience or hands on mastery in such situations where Mobile Payments or Mobile Wallet based cross border remittances support country economies and proven in 100% confidence level that when it came to the crunch, many countries including Greece, Cyprus & Italy had no choice but to accept rescue terms that affected not only bank bondholders and shareholders – but thousands of private deposit holders.

Their cash or savings were simply scalped and went to help fund the closure of one bank and the propping up of others. The so-called “haircut” imposes comes along the way that helps in woresing the problem in negative smily way. Solution that is hastily designed to fall with large sums in offshore accounts can be avoided very well with MFS. Mobile Payments expected to explode beyond 3 trillion euros by 2020, Mobile Money will save 2 billion USD for few African countries, Mobile Money is not just cash in, cash out via agents any more or P2P money transfer Africa have given new and very different dimension and speed of like blink of eyes, getting Money from UK, US or anywhere in the world within seconds around 24X7 directly to your wallets, all bill payments, merchant payments, loans, insurance …. and never stopping or ending story.

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

Hash Tagas : #payments, #mobilepayments, #mobilemoney, #money, #mobile, #FinancialCrises, #TransformLives, #WeTransformLives