International Banking :French bank, Twitter team up for money transfers via tweets

REUTERS PARIS/ FRANKFURT, OCT 13:2014

One of France's largest banks is teaming up with social network Twitter Inc. this week to allow its customers to transfer money via tweets.

The move by Groupe BPCE, France's second largest bank by customers, coincides with Twitter's own push into the world of online payments as the social network seeks new sources of revenue beyond advertising.

Twitter is racing other tech giants Apple and Facebook to get a foothold in new payment services for mobile phones or apps. They are collaborating and, in some cases, competing with banks and credit card issuers that have run the business for decades.

The bank said last month it was prepared to offer simple person-to-person money transfers via Twitter to French consumers, regardless of what bank they use, and without requiring the sender know the recipient's banking details.

"(S-Money) offers Twitter users in France a new way to send each other money, irrespective of their bank and without having to enter the beneficiary's bank details, with a simple tweet," Nicolas Chatillon, Chief Executive of S-Money, BPCE's mobile payments unit, said in the statement.

Payment by tweets will be managed via the bank's S-Money service, which allows money transfers via text message and relies on the credit-card industry's data security standards.

BPCE and Twitter declined to provide further details ahead of a news conference in Paris on Tuesday to unveil the service.

Last month, Twitter started trials of its own new service, dubbed ‘Twitter Buy’, to allow consumers to find and buy products on its social network.

The service embeds a ‘Twitter Buy’ button inside tweets posted by more than two dozen stores, music artists and non-profits. Burberry, Home Depot, and musicians such as Pharrell and Megadeth are among the early vendors.

Twitter's role to date has been to connect customers rather than processing payments or checking their identities.

"From the Twitter point of view, there is a limit to their appetite for getting involved in payments processing itself," said Andrew Copeman, a payments analyst with financial services research firm AITE Group, who is based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

"At the moment, banks are probably viewing Twitter and other social media networks as marketing channels to reach a wider set of their customers and to extend the bank's existing mobile banking initiatives," he said.

Twitter's success in developing additional services on its platform as Facebook has done will be key to its future profitability. Rakuten Bank in Japan offers a similar "Transfer by Facebook" service that lets users of its mobile banking app send money to anyone in their Facebook friends list.

Investors have been worried about Twitter's slowing user growth, sending the shares down about 17 per cent this year, while rival Facebook's have climbed 35 per cent.

Thomas Husson, a marketing strategy analyst with Forrester Research, said Twitter was likely to multiply efforts to explore new ways to generate revenue with banks and credit card firms.

"Twitter wants to more explicitly demonstrate the overall value of its network as an advertising platform," he said.

Kotak Bank launches Facebook-based instant money transfer

 

BL 13 Oct 2014

Kotak Mahindra Bank (KMB) has launched KayPay, a bank agnostic payment product for Facebook users to send money to each other in an instant.

Millions of bank account holders can now transfer money to each other at any hour of the day or night, without needing net banking, or knowing various bank account related details of the payee, the private sector bank said in a statement.

KayPay will enable over 25 crore Indian bank account holders to transfer funds to each other instantly by just choosing recipients from their Facebook friends list.

The bank said KayPay offers a safe and secure platform to transact on the social networking site through a two-level authentication – Facebook user id & password and a One Time Password (OTP).

Further, both sender and receiver immediately receive notifications via SMS and on Facebook about the transfer.

As a one-time process, users need to register their existing bank accounts, which participate in the IMPS (Immediate Payment System) P2M Pull platform by National Payment Corporation of India, on Facebook or www.kaypay.com. Currently, KMB is offering KayPay at no cost to users.​

According to Shanti Ekambaram, President – Consumer Banking, Kotak Mahindra Bank, KayPay leverages social media to offer a better and secure payment platform to all.

"The convenience of not having to know payee details breaks down all barriers of a process, which otherwise requires a host of information that one may not necessarily have handy,” she said

Nobel Peace Prize laureate : Malala got the Nobel peace prize

Yousafzai plans to stay away from Pakistan for at least another three years, according to Mahmudul Hassan, her uncle. Photo: AFP

  Bloomberg  Islamabad: MON, OCT 13 2014. 01 03 PM IS

Two policemen with AK-47 rifles stood guard in the narrow ally outside of Malala Yousafzai’s uncle’s house in Pakistan this weekend,
 watching for anything suspicious after she became the
 first teenager to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

Yousafzai, 17, celebrated the award some 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometres) away in the UK, where she’s lived since Taliban militants shot her in the face on the way to school two years ago.

She plans to stay away from Pakistan for at least another three years, according to Mahmudul Hassan, her uncle.

“Apparently security is fine but Allah knows better,” he said at his home in Mingora, a town in the northwest Swat River valley, where Pakistani Taliban militants briefly took power five years ago. “We can’t risk her life.”

Pakistan’s battle with Taliban militancy is far from over, with an army offensive in June near the Afghan border doing little to ally fears in Mingora. A rally two days ago for Yousafzai, who shared the award with Indian child rights activist Kailash Satyarthi, attracted only several dozen people.

“Targeted killings are still taking place,” Ahmed Shah, a private school principal who led the rally two days ago, said in an interview. “Members of the tribal council, politicians, opinion-makers are being shot dead. In such an environment, how can people come onto the streets?”

Five years ago, Swat’s scenic mountains, rivers and lakes became infiltrated with Taliban guerrillas, who imposed their strict interpretation of Islamic law. They denied education to girls, beheaded local officials and burned schools in a battle that uprooted 2 million people from their homes in the forested valley that sits 155 miles north of the capital Islamabad.

Bullet strikes

While a 10-week army offensive starting in May 2009 ended their rule, Taliban strikes remained common. Militants attacked Yousafzai in October 2012 on her way to school in retaliation for her campaign for girls to be given equal rights to education. The bullet struck just above her left eye, grazing her brain.

She flew to the UK for emergency treatment, where she now attends school in Birmingham.

As she gained global fame for her struggle against illiteracy, poverty and terrorism, resentment grew in Pakistan.

Critics said the US and other western countries were using her to disparage local culture.

Those sentiments manifested after the peace prize. Amirul Azeem, a spokesman for the religious Jamaat-e-Islami party, asked why Yousafzai won the award over Palestinian children who continued attending school amid persistent violence.

Critics complain

“There are many talented girls who have proven their mettle, but why was she was chosen?” Ali Raza Yousafzai, a student at Sarhad University in Peshawar, a prominent city in the northwest dominated by residents who share the Pashtun ethnicity of the Taliban militants, said while visiting Mingora to see his family, which isn’t related to Malala. “What extraordinary thing did she do?”

In awarding the peace prize, the Nobel committee cited Yousafzai’s fight for girls to be educated “under the most dangerous circumstances.” She also showed that young people can lead by example, the committee said.

After the Taliban banned girls from school, Yousafzai said she had two options: Stay silent and be killed, or speak and be killed. She saw her dreams of becoming a doctor disappearing.

“My life would just be getting married at the age of 13 or 14, not going to school, not becoming who I really can be,” Yousafzai told reporters in Birmingham on 10 October. “So I decided that I would speak up.”

Attitudes changing

Yousafzai said this is just the beginning of her campaign for every child to go to school. One day, she said, she wants to become a “good politician.”

Taliban militants still want her dead.

“Characters like Malala should know that we are not deterred by propaganda of infidels,” Ehsanullah Ehsan, a spokesman for Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a faction of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, that attacked Yousafzai. “We have prepared sharp and shiny knives for enemy of Islam.”

Perceptions of Yousafzai in Swat Valley and throughout the country are slowly starting to shift. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called her the “pride of Pakistan” after the award.

“I can see a change in people’s attitude,” Fazal Khaliq, Yousafzai’s teacher in Mingora, said at the rally to celebrate her. “Those considering her anti-Pakistan, anti-Pashtun and anti-Islam are now thinking differently.”

Help needed

Improving the plight of millions of Pakistani women who are deprived of basic education and equal work opportunities may prove just as hard.

Only 23% of women older than 10 work in Pakistan, compared with 78% of males in the same category, according to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. Some 37% of rural women can read and write, compared with 64% of men, finance ministry statistics show.

Irfan Alam, a farmer in Mingora, said Yousafzai’s award would improve perceptions of Swat and compel Pakistan’s leaders to focus more on education.

“It doesn’t matter if she comes back soon or not, but she should not forget its people and their problems,” he said while picking his children up from school. “She is talented and there are many more who need attention.”

Nobel Peace Prize laureate : Inside The world of Kailash Satyarthi

Photo: Reuters

Prabhat Singh |  Dipti Jain  live Mint 
13 Oct 2014
Here’s a look at 10 charts which show the herculean nature of the task the Nobel Peace Prize laureate has taken upon himself

The chhotus and munnis are ubiquitous in India, across metros and small towns, sweeping floors, fetching tea, crawling under cars, rolling bidis and making crackers, even lifting bricks at building sites. They are a shame to a society which has failed miserably at protecting their childhood while boasting of various rights and laws to prevent exploitation of children. It is to fill this breach that the likes of Kailash Satyarthi have stepped forward. Here’s a look at 10 charts which show the herculean nature of the task the Nobel Peace Prize laureate has taken upon himself.

A large number of working children

Two percent of Indian children between ages 5 and 14 are child labourers. That is 4.3 million working children, according to Census 2011. Moreover, the Census looks at only full-time workers. The United Nation’s State of World Children report has a more stringent criteria—5-11-year-olds who did at least one hour of economic activity or at least 28 hours of household chores in a week; more for 12-14-year-olds. By that definition, one in every eight Indian child is in work.

Still, we are better off than a decade ago

Only two out of every 100 children work now, compared to five at the beginning of this century. There may be no causal link here, but it is worth pointing out that the fall in child labour rates has taken place in a decade when school attendance rates shot up. Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh figure in the list of states with the worst child protection records. However, smaller states such as Manipur and Sikkim have notched up remarkable records in reducing child labour, with reductions of over 10 percentage points each.

The social background of working children

Expectedly, poor and uneducated families have the highest percentage of child labourers. Poverty often compels parents to take their children out of education and put them in professions where they might be exposed to great harm, for the sake of an often-unsustainable income. The iron grip of caste hierarchies reveals itself even in the data on child labour, with Scheduled Caste and SC and Scheduled Tribe families accounting for a considerably higher proportion of child labourers.

The reasons for hiring children

The International Labour Organization notes that there have been few studies on the demand-side pull of child labour, i.e., the role played by employers in the prevalence of child labour. An old survey from 1999 gives us a picture though, as shown in Chart 4A. All but the last parameter points to profit reasons, which means firms, besides the poverty of families, do indeed help perpetuate the vicious cycle of child labour. This is especially true of industries which require low skill labour, which means the ill-trained and relatively low productive children are highly sought after by unscrupulous employers. Across most industries that employ a considerable proportion of children, the child wages are about half of adult wages.

Where do these children work?

Agriculture is the largest employer of children, just as in the case of adult Indians. That is not surprising. One, this sector requires low-skill labour which means children can be made to work for comparatively lower wages without great loss of productivity. Second, almost the entire sector falls under the informal category, which means anti-child labour laws are easy to dodge.

While the proportion of children employed in other sectors is relatively low, they are often dangerous. According to Census 2001, one out of every 10 child worker is employed by the so-called hazardous industries. Of these, the tobacco industry employed the highest number of children—over 250,000.

Rehabilitation efforts are minimal

India has several laws for the protection of children. It also has schemes such as the National Child Labour Project (NCLP) for rescue and rehabilitation of children. While it is a step in the right direction, the track record is not exemplary. As Chart 6A shows, the NCLP has rehabilitated 895,000 children since 1988. Over the same period, Satyarthi’s Bachpan Bachao Andalon alone has rescued 83,000 children.

Secondly, enforcement of laws in this space is abysmal. Inspections against possible offenders of the Child Labour Act have dropped by three-fourths in the four years to 2011. The good news is that the rate of conviction of offenders has climbed sharply, from five out of 100 prosecutions in 2007 to 17 out of 100 in 2011.

Clearly, India has still a long way to go before it can claim to be a child-friendly country.