Payments & Settlement

1. Comparing the mainstream payment methods 1. Business-to-business cash transfer How it works: an initiated transfer from a bank counter or corporate online banking, or a payment through a bank’s fund-splitting system with a receipt. Limits: large transfers are possible. Anything above RMB 50,000 goes through the PBOC’s large-value payment system, which doesn’t run on weekends and holidays, and can be affected accordingly (on weekdays it runs from 20:30 the previous evening through 17:15 the same day). ...

I’ve recently been working on some anti-fraud and anti-money-laundering projects, and it’s given me a much more concrete sense of how telecom fraud and money laundering actually work. E-commerce platforms are an easy target for criminals, and as a product manager you have to design with that risk in mind from the start — if crime ends up happening on your product, the best case is you feel terrible about it, and the worst case is regulatory penalties. Under China’s “dual penalty” system, that liability now runs from the platform all the way down to the individuals responsible. Fighting this kind of crime is everyone’s job. ...

Notes from working through Cross-Border E-Commerce Payment and Settlement, my starting point for getting into cross-border payments. A few basic concepts Foreign exchange (FX) Foreign exchange is a claim held by a country’s monetary authorities — the central bank, currency management bodies, exchange stabilization funds, and the treasury — in the form of bank deposits, treasury bills, and short- and long-term government securities, that can be drawn on to cover a balance-of-payments deficit. It covers foreign currency itself, foreign-currency deposits, foreign-currency securities (government bonds, treasury bills, corporate bonds, stocks), and foreign-currency payment instruments such as drafts, bank certificates of deposit, and postal savings certificates. ...