Social Web Breakfast #swb #Banking (@ Operncafé w/ 2 others)

These days, there’s literally an app for everything: keeping recipes, managing projects, invoicing customers, and managing one’s finances. Money management is an especially popular app category now that people can simplify budget tracking and analyze both earnings and expenses all in one window.

May 19th 2012 | | The Economist | Anonymous

the growth of internet usage on smartphones, the rise of “big data” computer processing and the increasing willingness of customers to do complicated things online. These developments have long promised to transform the way banks do business and organise themselves....If this was just a more convenient way of paying, the banks would probably shrug. But it also promises to overturn your existing financial relationships. Instead of reaching for the first card that happens to be in your wallet to pay for a $2 cup of coffee (and risk being charged a $35 penalty by your bank for exceeding your overdraft limit), your phone will choose the best method of payment.

"macro-economics, on which topic Ray Dalio's paper A Template for Understanding What is Going on is an astoundingly good explanation of the current global credit crisis. Dalio explains:

the difference between credit and money: credit is the promise to deliver money, and credit spends just like money. While credit and money spend just as easily, when you pay with money the transaction is settled; but if you pay with credit, the payment has yet to be made.
that while money exists, credit is created and disappears simply by belief: most of what people think is money is really credit, and it does disappear. For example, when you buy something in a store on a credit card, you essentially do so by saying, 'I promise to pay.' Together you created a credit asset and a credit liability. So where did you take the money from? Nowhere. You created credit. It goes away in the same way. Suppose the store owner justifiably believes that you and others might not pay the credit card company and that the credit card company might not pay him if that happens. Then he correctly believes that the 'asset' he has isn't really there. It didn't go somewhere else.
and finally, in two paragraphs so deft that they have to be read to be believed, a description of the game of Monopoly firstly in terms of property vs cash, and secondly a version modified to allow the bank to create credit, in which case the game starts exhibiting the same credit cycles as our actual economy.""I now understand credit as transferring no risk. The bank may front me cash now, but I give them security in the form of my house or something else. I retain all risk, nothing is transferred. There is no risk to the bank in issuing the credit. What I'm paying the bank for is access to their proprietary marketplace to exchange forms of capital - in the case I mentioned, cash and houses - together with a promise that the exchange won't be finalised so long as certain conditions are met. So credit is possible not because the bank is able to absorb risk, but because:

the bank has an internal marketplace in which it is able to hold open many capital exchanges; and,
the bank is able to enforce - using the legal system itself - the fungibility of capital and obligation: if it gives me cash, it can get my house in return.
Yes, the bank does have risk here, but it's not the same risk as my risk. It's new risk.

Interestingly what this leaves available is a system in which risk and cash are exchanged, where risk is transferred. This is what investment is, and this is what Kickstarter does."

Yep, Mobile Payments are not an emerging trend or something to worry about in the future – they are mainstream and they are now.

Denn Smava wird nun neben seinem weiter aktiven Social Lending Standbein zum ganz normalen Drittanbieter für die Kreditprodukte von gängigen Banken und anderen Finanzdienstleistern.

not terribly surprising when as an industry banks invest millions t get an edge on speed of trades for a small commercial lever