Rethinking Conventional Wisdom

Socrates famously stated, “The more I know, the more I realize I know nothing” — an appropriate adage for today’s data. Facebook was all anyone talked about last week, but Karen Webster has reason to believe they mostly got it wrong. People keep trying to pigeonhole PayPal as wanting to be a bank, when it wants to be anything but. Meanwhile, banks see their mobile prowess ignored as they grow. Even tokens — and how long they’ve been floating in the payments space — are oft misunderstood. Luckily, where memory breeds confusion, numbers breed clarity.

The Data:

2.5 quintillion: The number of bytes of data produced per minute on Earth.

30 million: Citigroup’s mobile banking customer count — up 25 percent from last year.

10 million: The fine Wells Fargo is potentially facing from the CFPB and OCC over mortgages and car insurance.

40,000: The number of searches per second carried out on Google.

13 years: The amount of time Merchant Link has been working on its tokenization efforts.