Banking Cartel Wars

A big change in international payments has been on the horizon for a long time. Crypto currencies and modern communication technologies to make payments as instant as credit cards has been available for quite sometime. The fact that banks around the world have not implemented this technology only demonstrates how banking functions as a cartel as opposed to a public utility.  

Today the biggest roadblock to instant payments are government regulations and central banks. Banks, especially commercial banks, have a love hate relationship with regulation, one the one hand regulation forces banks to be cops investigating their own customers and on the other hand regulations prevent competitors from entering the market and negates the need for banks to innovate. 

Modern technology companies who are in Mad Max style competition at all times look at the payments industry and salivate. Within banks technology systems are ancient so that there are  dedicated teams managing code in dead programming languages yet at the same time banks spend astonishingly large amounts of money on technology. How can it be that so many spend produces so much crap? The answer is very simple, banking IT senior executives are brilliant at convincing banking management that technology is so complicated that only highly paid people manage it while paying the lowest price to Chinese and Indian techies to keep the shitty systems running. 

Now the tech companies that need to work with banks to receive payments have figured how to get around them and banks are panicked. The banks will ultimately fail at innovating as long as the salesmen bankers keep running the show. I look forward to Japan’s Ripple innovation that will start to kill national currencies and start to dissolve the power of the state. (The Japanese government is just a corporate puppet so won’t get in the way)

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Japanese payment innovation

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Banking ripe for disruption