Profile

Location

Concord

Member since

2015

Reads

CGAP MicroFinance Gateway Center for Financial Inclusion Financial Inclusion Insights

Writes about

Payments Regulation & Compliance Retail banking Wholesale banking Start ups Financial inclusion

Graham's blog archive

2019 (1) 2018 (3) 2017 (2) 2016 (23) 2015 (12)

Graham Seel

Principal Consultant at BankTech Consulting

Message Posts: 44 Comments: 50

Bio Consultant to Fintech firms selling to, or partnering with, banks. Services include fractional Customer Success Executive, custom sponsored webinars, papers, etc. Career History 30-plus years in technology and product management roles, and 3 years in non-profit financial services for the poor.

Blogs

Financial Inclusion

Can Savings Group to Bank Linkage Really Work? A Tale of Two Banks

16 Jul 2019

There has been plenty of discussion in recent years about the effectiveness of linking informal Savings Groups with formal Financial Service Providers. Some people will tell you that they are very effective in expanding the capabilities of savings groups to further benefit economic growth in the community. Others will tell you that SGs and FSPs ha...

Financial Inclusion

Technology the Answer to Savings Group Linkage

27 Apr 2018

Technology is essential if linkage is to work for savings group members and for banks. But what technology? A soon-to-be-published report for World Renew documents my research on Savings Group linkages to FSPs. One of the areas I explore is the role of technology in creating sustainable, profitable and effective linkage. Technology to Redu...

Financial Inclusion

What Could Be Better Than Savings Groups?

21 Apr 2018

The simple answer: Savings Groups plus access to a formal Financial Services Provider (FSP). Sometimes! A soon-to-be-published report for World Renew documents my research on Savings Group linkages to FSPs. The key question is whether, when and how to link Savings Groups (such as the CARE Village Savings and Loan model) to formal providers like ban...

Financial Inclusion

Linking Savings Groups to the Formal Financial Sector

13 Jan 2018

Financial Inclusion efforts for the world’s poorest people have particularly focused on urban areas, and have had some success. But there is a tremendous relatively untapped opportunity for the formal financial sector to extend their reach to the rural poor. Millions people have joined informal savings groups in 75+ countries, with estimates r...

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Graham is Commenting on

Why migrating to the cloud offers more security than you might think

Good post. The DTCC published quite a useful white paper in May in which they concluded that they couldn't afford not to move to the cloud, given the gap in security knowledge and capability. Having said that, particularly for smaller banks the complexity and impact on the current IT person/group shouldn't be underestimated. There is a good business opportunity for consultants who really understand a particular cloud platform (e.g. AWS), cybersecurity, and community banks or credit unions.

22 Aug 2017 Reply Read article

Should SWIFT be afraid of blockchain technology?

Carlo, thanks. This is a good, well-structured post, leading to at least as likely an outcome as any. There is a certain amount of arrogance about Ripple's stance that could come back to bite them. But a collaboration between SWIFT and Ripple would make sense if they can play nice together - they are radically different kinds of organization. A few things to bear in mind: 1. SWIFT is a messaging system, not a payment settlement system. Settlement occurs through funding of nostro accounts. 2. SWIFT messaging covers more than just payments - FX contract confirmations, letters of credit, nostro statements, etc. 3. There is much more to SWIFT than a messaging infrastructure - the community, governance, standards body, etc are all needed in some form. 4. Adoption by a handful of banks (or even a few hundred) doesn't resolve the need for a truly global payments messaging infrastructure. Without a collaboration, there is a real market risk that enough volume will move from SWIFT to a blockchain-based alternative to make SWIFT unprofitable, while thousands of banks lack the resources to make the switch in the same timeframe - there could be a time during which there is no viable payment mechanism for smaller international banks. 5. SWIFT has made a whole-scale technology transition before, when it moved to an X.25 based network. It was long and painful, but almost entirely without major problems. A move to a distributed ledger infrastructure is also eminently possible without major disruption. My money is on SWIFT partnering with Ripple, Ethereum, or another consortium - partnership for transformation, not competition for disruption.

13 Oct 2016 Reply Read article

Ripple rudely gatecrashes Sibos party

Some sparring is inevitable. In reality Ripple's experiments, while promising, are not valid comparisons even for end-to-end payment times (which is far from the only challenge - see my recent FinExtra post Is Blockchain Really the Answer to Global Payments?) The majority of SWIFT payments occur within 24 hours - and a good proportion within an hour or even minutes. Delays are typically caused not by the infrastructure, but by banking calendar mismatches, and incomplete or invalid payment instructions. Ripple has not yet proposed a solution to these - delivery of a smart contract doesn't ensure the beneficiary has use of the funds. However, collaboration is essential if payments infrastructure is to be transformed. SWIFT won't be successful on its own, at least not in a timely manner. There are contributions to learning being made by many players - Ripple for sure, as well as R3, Hyperledger, and Ethereum. That Ripple are at SIBOS is good, and a little repartee increases bankers' awareness. They just need to not take it too far, and SWIFT need to avoid being too defensive.

29 Sep 2016 Reply Read article

Can Blockchain Prevent Cybercrime?

Well written summar of the Bangladesh incident and some of its implications. There is a potential role for distributed ledger technology, but I'm not convinced it would solve the underlying problem. The problems all lie on the periphery, the entry points to the SWIFT network. The same would still apply - somewhere or other there is going to be a transition from core banking systems and payments operations to the distributed payment delivery and settlement network. Blockchain is not a panacea, even though it will ultimately make huge contributions to improving security and efficiency of financial networks. The need for robust cyber-security policies and controls (both automated and operational) is not going away any time soon.

10 Sep 2016 Reply Read article