Simon's blog on Payments and Money

In July last year, the European Commission published a proposalfor a revised Payment Services Directive (PSD) . The proposal draws on the w...

Having gone through my daily portion of Bitcoin-reads ( and being somewhat sceptic ), it struck me that one of the compelling argume...

These days I noticed an interesting discussion in my Twitter time line and on the web on the fact that the German government has 'reco...

Today, the European Commission will announce a proposal for a Directive on Bank Accounts that covers the following areas: - comparability...

The last month, the ECB published a report on virtual currency schemes . I have been reading this with great interest as it signals the invo...

This year in May, I was visiting the 15th Digital Money Forum (well organised as ever, by Dave Birch and his team at Hyperion), and ran acr...

It's about five years ago that I discovered, by accident and curiosity, that Google Payments Limited had applied for an e-money license ...

As you may know I am somewhat sceptic about the underpinnings of Bitcoin (see my previous posts ), but the system does keep innovation going...

Reserve Banking is an art. While Draghi and Bernanke are highly qualified and professional economists, they must also master the art of perf...

One week ago Rabobank Nederland announced that it might de-activate the possibility to use their debit-card outside Europe, in an effort to ...

Today, the Dutch central bank published a report that debit-card usage is affected by news articles on fraud. On average, the number of dai...

The Digital Money Forum is an event that this year reached it's 15th anniversary. And a special event it is. My previous visit to the Fo...

The federal reserve has yesterday issued this study on Consumers and Mobile Financial Services . And it shows that mobiles are a game-change...

As many of you may know, the Netherlands are now in a final stage of migrating from the Dutch POS-system PIN to the international card schem...

This sunday I wanted to order a cd and sheet music by Jules de Corte. Whereas usually this is just a matter of seconds, using iDeal, I now h...

With all the new apps, technology and stuff, you can just build any payment produkt you like. It appears there is a Danish bank that has de...

This new year brings us a bit of a memory: ten years ago we started using the euro bank notes. For many people in the Netherlands, this was ...

These days it's about ten years ago that I started blogging: I set up the blog Retail Betaalgedachten to voice my views on the retail p...

Tweakers net today reports that T-mobile is leaving the consortium of banks and telco's in the Netherlands . The sixpack consortium is ...

The Dutch Bankers Association today starts a campaign to increase awareness of consumers that they shouldn't fall for the numerous phis...

As some of you may know, I have had quite an interest in electronic money in the Netherlands  in the past. And yesterday I had the pleasure ...

Today, our central bank, De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) released survey results on Dutch payments in 2010 . It showed that in 2010 consumers i...