Glenbrook

Regulatory Analysis of KYC for Covid-19 in Emerging Markets

By Zak Kazzaz on April 30 2020

Download a PDF version of this document here. Read our introductory discussion here. Regulatory Background The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) sets global standards for combating money laundering (ML) and the financing of terrorism (TF) and proliferation. While its recommendations are not binding, they are broadly accepted by regulators as guidelines for national rules.  FATF […]

Global Payments

UPDATED: Balancing KYC Regulation and COVID-19 Relief in Emerging Markets

By Zak Kazzaz on April 16 2020

Download the PDF of our Regulatory Analysis of KYC for Covid-19 in Emerging Markets or read the web version. Among today’s most pressing questions for emerging market governments is how to get assistance funds into the hands of those who need it given the COVID-19 crisis. This need is especially acute in emerging markets that lack […]

Cici Northup

Lowering the Cost of Remittance – the Southern African Development Community (SADC)

By Cici Northup on October 11 2017

There was an estimated $55b billion in cross-border remittances in 2015. But how much of that, per transaction, arrived in the wallet of the intended recipient? Unfortunately, not as much as many of us would hope. The cost of remittances is quite high with the average cost worldwide nearing 8% in 2015. And in some […]

Elizabeth McQuerry

Expanded Frontiers in Mobile Payment

By Elizabeth McQuerry on September 6 2016

One of the payments obsessions here at Glenbrook is understanding the ways in which mobile payment and digital financial services are taking hold around the world. Once effectively limited to the early success of M-PESA and P2P payment in Kenya, today there are a number of services underway. M-PESA itself, in around a decade, has […]

Allen Weinberg

Merchant Acceptance in the Developing World – Mobile Payments’ Essential Missing Link

By Allen Weinberg on June 13 2016

Over the past several years, my colleagues and I at Glenbrook have been working on a variety of projects focused on bringing low-cost financial services to the poor in developing countries. While there has been a lot written on how mobile or eMoney payments systems such as M-PESA in Kenya have grown in many developing […]

Banking Industry

Faster Payments Survey – Your Immediate Reply Requested

By Elizabeth McQuerry on April 18 2016

It’s been just over two years since we first reached out and asked for your views on the question of faster payments. There have been a number of interesting developments in that period – the launch of FAST in Singapore, the announcement of the New Payments Platform in Australia, development of an instant payment scheme […]

Card Payments

Inside the Payments Boot Camp – Global Payments

By Russ Jones on September 22 2015

Last year we expanded our Payments Boot Camp program to include a series of one-day workshops that give us an opportunity to dive a little deeper into a topic to share our experience and insights in a more interactive forum. And no topic has as much “real-world” demand as Global Payments. It’s a broad area […]

Banking Industry

Glenbrook’s Elizabeth McQuerry is IPFA CEO

By Elizabeth McQuerry on June 3 2015

This week, I began an important new assignment. I am now the CEO of the International Payments Framework Association (IPFA). If you haven’t yet heard of it, the IPFA provides rules, standards, operating procedures, and guidelines to improve cross-border payments. It’s now five years old and moving into the next, exciting, and supercharged phase of payments […]

Banking

A Different Type of Start Up: Payments in Afghanistan

By Elizabeth McQuerry on February 26 2015

Imagine a country where less than 10% of the adult population has a bank account and only about half of those account holders have a debit card. Credit cards are virtually non-existent. There are only a couple dozen banks in the whole country. Cash truly is king. Now imagine decades-long political and sectarian conflict that […]

Elizabeth McQuerry

A Central Bank Takes on Mobile Payments

By Elizabeth McQuerry on October 16 2014

Ecuador’s Central Bank has embarked on an ambitious course to launch an affordable and widely available mobile payment scheme.  In fact, it will be the national wallet. With some uncertainty, it appears that Ecuador’s initiative may be the second central bank effort to enter this space. Jordan’s central bank has launched “JoMoPay”, but for those […]