Skip to main content

Bank runs in the digital era | FT Alphaville

xxx

"One critical difference with a traditional bank run is that, in a digital run, the money presumably stays within the banking system, but is moved to another bank."

From "Bank runs in the digital era | FT Alphaville".

I hadn’t really thought much about this. In an old-fashioned bank run where panicked customers storm bank branches to demand to demand their cash and the contents of their safety deposit boxes — as happened last week in west London, for example, when rumours about the stability of Metro Bank spread from an anonymous source in Slough to depositors who had apparently never heard of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) — the money may re-enter the banking system, it may end up under mattresses or re-invested into Bitcoin or something. But a digital bank run is different.

(If I heard from someone in Slough that Barclays was about to go down, taking my overdraft and mortgage with them, I might well log in and transfer the £47.23 in my Barclays Rewards account to the safe haven of Nationwide or via Transferwise to my US Simple account. I certainly wouldn’t be arsed to catch the bus into Woking town centre and get in line to draw out the cash.)

The main point of that Alphaville article, though, is something really rather interesting. In the future, when thanks to Open Banking, 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

new survey results from USA Technologies (USAT) suggest. The payments technology company, which enables electronic payments for self-service machines, compared consumer spending activity at 35 of its vending machines in urban areas with a high concentration of iPhone users between week one and week four of the installation of new digital signage promoting Apple Pay. Consumers made more contactless purchases: The vending machine providers saw an average contactless transaction revenue increase of 89%, implying that consumers are making more mobile payments. This was likely driven by the clear advertisement of Apple Pay. Total transactions increased: Consumers made more purchases overall. This was probably driven by an uptick in mobile payments, given the major increase in contactless transaction revenue. And the vending machines may have attracted many first-time users who were drawn in by the digital advertising of Apple Pay. Boosting awareness is key to unlocking pent-up demand amon...
Post a Comment
Read more

David | LinkedIn

Alex Todd rather kindly called this a “most lucid explanation of digital identity management” I would highly recommend this presentation to anyone interested in understanding prospective blockchain based identity architectures From David | LinkedIn This is very kind, but as I said in the link, this is thinking out loud and far from a fully-developed solution. We’re working on parts of this for different clients and I can see that there is something there - a genuinely new way of solving some old problems - but it’s early days.
Post a Comment
Read more

We could fix mobile security, you know. We don't, but we could

Earlier in the week I blogged about mobile banking security , and I said that in design terms it is best to assume that the internet is in the hands of your enemies. In case you think I was exaggerating… The thieves also provided “free” wireless connections in public places to secretly mine users’ personal information. From Gone in minutes: Chinese cybertheft gangs mine smartphones for bank card data | South China Morning Post Personally, I always use an SSL VPN when connected by wifi (even at home!) but I doubt that most people would ever go to this trouble or take the time to configure a VPN and such like. Anyway, the point is that the internet isn’t secure. And actually SMS isn’t much better, which is why it shouldn’t really be used for securing anything as important as home banking. The report also described how gangs stole mobile security codes – which banks automatically send to card holders’ registered mobile phones to verify online transactions – by using either a Trojan...
Post a Comment
Read more