Kevin Mellyn
Payments Knowledge Center, MasterCard Advisors
Kevin Mellyn is a of member MasterCard Advisors' Payments Knowledge Center. He is an expert on banking, financial markets, and payment systems worldwide and has worked with financial service companies and governments around the globe. Author of Financial Market Meltdown and numerous articles on banking and payments, Mr. Mellyn is based in Purchase, N.Y. and can be reached at kevin_mellyn@mastercard.com.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about mobile payments. And while the reality more than lives up to the hype, it’s important to understand why. The future of payments may well come “out of Africa.” Payment is essentially an “information logistics” problem. Except for specie (gold and silver), all money consists of promises to
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Last night I was multi-tasking between the important (catching up on Mad Men, having missed Sunday’s broadcast due to Easter) and the mundane (reading a copy of David Wolman’s The End of Money) and experienced an epiphany of sorts: paper currency is as ubiquitous today as smoking cigarettes was in the 1960’s—and may suffer the
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The good news this week is that consumer borrowing in the United States jumped by over $20 billion in November, the biggest increase since November of 2001, according to Federal Reserve data. Leaving aside whether or not this reflects a real turning point in consumer confidence, the increase reminds us that in an economy where
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It makes sense to sell financial services to people with money just as it does to sell kennel services to people with dogs. The problem is that financial institutions are chasing the affluent at the same time their numbers are in decline. A smarter approach would be to figure out how to profitably serve all
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“Hegel remarks somewhere ‘all great world-historic facts …appear twice’; he forgot to add the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce” – Karl Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852 Want to know what’s going to happen to banking and payments? Follow financial history. We have lived through this before as a tragedy.
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Access to a bank transaction account (being “banked”) is a key index of living standards improving over time. Recent FDIC data suggests that the United States is actually “unbanking the banked.” One-quarter of the U.S. population is unbanked or under-banked, up from around 15 percent a generation ago*. While there are certainly a variety of
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