A Unifying Theory of Electronic Money and Payment Systems

Abstract

We present a general theory of payment systems that is capable of describing both traditional and electronic forms of payment. Starting from the three basic functions of money and general non-functional requirements, we derive the necessary and sufficient properties of technical implementations of money and payments. We describe possible scalable implementations of e-money schemes based on a general description of their data structures (money distributions) and payments. We define the notion of bill scheme, in which the value units are bills with invariant values, and show that only the bill scheme allows for scalable and practically efficient implementations through decomposition, where the components have to process a considerably smaller amount of data and a number of payment requests, compared to the whole system.

Public policy and developmental imperatives: theorising governance in the case of social grants in Endumeni Local Municipality, KwaZulu-Natal

“…While for the electronic payment method, the grant is paid into the personal bank account of a beneficiary and can be collected, by a beneficiary or a procurator, from banks or retail stores that permit the payment of such grants (Cwayi & Kogeda, 2013). Buldas et al (2021) state that, "in the last decades, electronic payment systems have been crucial for the development of economies and societies." Before the introduction of contemporary banking system, the banking process was manually done which resulted in a slowdown in payment of transactions as this system included sending transactions from one account to another with person's hands (Nwankwo & Eze, 2013).…”