Mobile banking allows people to manage financial services via their smartphones. No wonder it is the fastest growing banking channel, with big implications for traditional options such as bank branches.

The World Economic Forum has recently published an article describing Colombia’s work to create Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), a key element of which is interoperable digital payments.

David Birch has written about the presentation made by Sarah Breeden, Deputy Governor at the Bank of England, at the Swiss National Bank’s event ‘Towards the future of the monetary system’. In it she described two waves of benefits from tokenisation. In the short term it will bring greater efficiency to the existing payment and settlement system. In the longer term she sees radical change to post-trade processes.

It appears that payment stakeholders in the US and UK are seeking to pass laws and take legal action to address a perceived lack of competition in the digital payment arena. In the last few weeks, there have been a series of reports detailing legislative, regulatory and court developments in this area.

The authors of a new European Central Bank (ECB) working paper have used data from the ECB’s Consumer Expectations Surveys (CES) to study cashless payments in everyday situations and the use of mobile banking apps in the euro area.

The rise of cashless payments has raised the concern that some consumers will be induced to spend beyond their means. As monthly income is spent over the course of a month, if consumers are aware of their reducing balance, they are likely to constrain their spending. The Swiss National Bank has published a paper that explores differences in how freely people spend between people who pay in cash and digitally and how their awareness of their balances affects their cash management.

A study of the use of mobile money in Bangladesh gives a new perspective on how it differs from other payment methods.

In a push to advance cashless transactions, four Czech banks are rolling out a novel solution that lets merchants skip traditional terminals while eliminating the need for customers to pay in cash.

Dr Franklin Noll, a payments specialist who works as a Lead at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, has posted in LinkedIn an interesting piece on financial / payment inclusion. He has expressed his own opinions, not those of the Federal Reserve Bank.

This article provides summary of how payments are changing as technology changes and is adopted. Also, an update on AI ‘watermarking’.