Today VISA introduced p2p personal payments in the US market. VISA partnered with CashEdge and Fiserv which will incorporate the new service to their platforms Popmoney and Zashpay.
The service allows to make payments directly to the recipients VISA account.
The new VISA person-to-person payment service was launched first with selected partners in Europe in February.
VISA seeks to capture market share for online payments from Paypal.
Education microfinance service Vittana.org (see earlier coverage about Vittana) now enables lenders to relend directly. Lenders no longer need to go through Paypal for every payment and repayment.
CEO Kushal Chakrabarti says: “Today, I have the honor of announcing that, as of last week, Vittana lenders had given over 200,000 US$ in loans to hundreds of young people who want to become engineers, policemen, biologists and much more.”
I finished reading “Innovation and the Future Proof Bank” (available at Amazon.com, Amazon UK and Amazon.de). The author James Gardner publishes the Bankervision blog, which I am a long time reader of.
Gardner defines categories of incremental, revolutionary and breakthrough innovations and further differentiates between disruptive and sustaining innovation. The book discusses innovation theories and models. Many examples and case studies are given. While the topic is innovation in banks, I felt that much of it applies to innovation in large companies that are incumbents in other industries, too.
An innovation team will evolve through 5 capacity stages: Inventing, Championing, Managing, Futurecasting and Venturing.
Gardner propagates Futurecasting as a method to assess trends from a strategic perspective. By building scenarios the innovator creates descriptive images of possible future impact of trends in combination with the banks approach on it.
Gardner uses p2p lending as an example in many chapters. E.g. in chapter 4.4 he creates analysis possible scenarios in a futurecast on p2p lending.
If you want to understand why so many banks currently ignore p2p lending as a trend the book offers some interesting arguments. However the other example often cited, Paypal, shows what happens, if banks wait too long without reacting.
The book contains a wealth of information, thoughts and examples. Too much to cope with in this short review. I enjoyed reading it and highly recommend this book to anyone interest in fostering innovation, the innovation process and how banks could react to an ever faster changing business environment.
Buy your copy at Amazon.com, Amazon UK or Amazon.de.
When I decided to withdraw some money from my Kiva account, I was informed:
This email confirms your withdrawal request of $25.00. You can expect the funds to be deposited into your paypal account within 1-3 weeks.
This astonished me. The withdrawal is conducted via paypal (as is the upload). The upload was almost instantly. Therefore I did not expect the withdrawal to take weeks.
BTW: So far my Kiva loans all pay on time.
MyC4 introduced "automatic bidding", an automatic bidding assistant that will bid on any new loan listings that match parameters set by the lender. Similar to the Standing Orders feature of Prosper.com, but not with as many selection criteria.
Mads Kjaer, CEO of MyC4, said:
The Auto Bid request came from several of the businesses we have talked with and also several Builders who asked for a quick way of get going.
You could say that this feature is also the preparation for e.g. philantrophy funds or bi-lateral organisations who want to use My4 to reach micro entrepeneurs in Africa at NO COST = 100.000 credits is 100.000 credits invested …
MyC4 now also enables the use of Paypal to transfer money into the MyC4 account.
