Bankloch

If there is one Indian innovation that has grabbed   global headlines , it is undoubtedly the instant payment system   UPI (Unified Payments Interface) . In August 2023, monthly UPI transactions exceeded an astounding 10 billion, marking a remarkable milestone for India’s payments ecosystem. No wonder that UPI has not only revolutionized transactions in India but has also gained international recognition for its remarkable growth. Launched in 2016 by the   National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)   in collaboration with 21 member banks, UPI quickly became popular among consumers and businesses. In just a few years, it achieved   remarkable milestones : By August 2023, UPI recorded an unprecedented   10.58 billion transactions , with an impressive 50% year-on-year growth. This volume represented approximately   190 billion euros . In July 2023, the UPI network connected   473 different banks . UPI is projected to achieve a staggering   1 ...

  A very hot topic at the moment are the so-called   CBDCs , short for " Central Bank Digital Currencies ". These are the recent reply of central banks to the continuing success of crypto-currencies like Bitcoin and Ether(eum). After the unsuccessful attempts of several governments to restrict or even ban these crypto-currencies, there is more and more a consensus of " If you can’t beat them, join them ", resulting in the setup of an alternative that fits better the agenda of governments and of central banks to stay relevant and in control of monetary policy. Very simplistically said, CBDCs are a   digital version of the fiat currencies   that people use in their daily lives. They take over a number of features, characteristics and technologies of crypto-currencies (CBDCs will be crypto tokens), but instead of being decentralized (and bypass central bank and government control), they ensure some degree of   centralization , allowing the central banks to keep con...

Due to the Covid crisis and the resulting increase of working from home (which will likely persist long after the crisis), the precious tradition (wide-spread in many companies) of   collecting money for a gift for a colleague   (typically for a wedding, child or pension) via a circulating envelope is now disappearing. In our modern digital age, this tradition seems a bit archaic, but it definitely helps to   enforce the bond between colleagues . With colleagues being one of the most important factors of employee happiness, this bonding is extremely important for employee motivation and as such for employee productivity and retention. Some teams have switched to alternatives like someone collecting the money on his personal bank account and taking care of the gift, but this is very time-consuming (e.g. correctly identifying all transactions on his account, especially if the collector is organizing multiple gifts in parallel) and impersonal (i.e. not possible to leave a pe...