Charmaine Oak
Charmaine Oak is the practice lead for Digital Money at Shift Thought. She has over 27 years of experience of creating and delivering solutions to market. Her skills and experience are at the intersection of mobile, banking and payments. She brings a unique perspective, having contributed to significant ventures at leading global companies: Western Union - one of the world’s largest financial brands, France Telecom/Orange – a leading mobile operator, Royal Bank of Scotland – a leading bank, LogicaCMG – the Pioneer in SMS and Wipro – one of the world's largest IT service providers.
It is easy to find fault in company launches, but as a former payments product manager I fully understand the courage it takes to even get to the market in the face of uncertainty, and the myriad factors that stand between you and success. So I invite you to take a few minutes to reflect […]
Could banks actually embrace disruption and grow stronger? Goldman Sachs recently forecasts that $4.7 trillion traditional financial services revenue could be at risk from disruption, but now banks are fighting back, and some could use the trends to their advantage. This blog builds on Part 1, Counter-strategies for global bank disruption where I share highlights […]
When I first entered the remittances industry the separation of these two industries was seen to be one of the laws of the universe, just as mobile was seen to be a desirable channel for which new silos were being built. I wrote The Digital Money Game to address the issues I foresaw with the […]
Now that details regarding Android Pay have emerged, I thought it would be interesting to contemplate where key mobile payments “ecosystem builders,” as I term them, stand with respect to the ongoing mobile payments game.Here is the State of Play in the Mobile Payments Game, post Android Pay The latest move is Google’s announcement of Android […]
Charmaine Oak, of Shift Thought recently completed a set of interviews where she spoke to experts from a range of industries and parts of the world to get their gut reactions on the state of the payments industry and what to expect next. In this post she shares highlights of my discussion with Roy Vella, Digital […]
A new report from the World Bank shows that alternatives to cash are helping to drive down the cost of remittances around the world. The global average cost of sending $200 declined from 8% in Q4 2014 to 7.7% of the amount transferred in Q1 2015. But is this progress enough, asks Charmaine Oak? As […]
Facebook is to launch P2P Money Transfer from Facebook Messenger, online and via Android smartphones. By the end of the year people in the US will be able to send money with no fees, using a Visa or MasterCard debit card. If Facebook has not yet made it big in payments, this is not for […]
We in the United Kingdom already use so little cash that we could easily have gone the way of the Nordics, where consumers have such good payment systems that mobile payments took a back seat. Yet in 2014 the UK pulled ahead in The Digital Money Game. At the player category level too we saw major […]
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