Blog Index

The main blog headlines this week include … If you think the future is purely digital, are you nuts? Arriving at the venue, I spot a good friend. We shake hands and hug. Then I see another friend I’ve missed. We hug and kiss. 1999? 2019? 2022? The conference network disappeared in 2020, and it’s…

The main blogs of this week were: WTF is an NFT? Watching the mainstream news show the other day, it finished with an item about NFTs, non-fungible tokens. It’s not the sort of thing that I would have expected most pensioners sitting having their night-time cup of cocoa watching the news would expect to see…

This week’s main blog notes include … Do we have a work-life balance anymore? What is work-life balance these days?  I accidentally on purpose started an interesting debate on LinkedIn. It began because someone posted on LinkedIn how proud they were of celebrating their sixteenth wedding anniversary, with photos of their wedding from 1995, and tagging a…

This week’s main blog notes include … Banks waste billions on digital How much money is wasted by banks on digital? I wonder whether, one day, anyone will work out how much money has been wasted by banks on digital technologies. Various reports reckon that banks spend anything from half a trillion dollars a year…

The main blog discussions this week include … CBDCs, the Digital Euro and how it might work I’m very aware that central banks are investigating the use of digital currencies, particularly as they can now see bitcoin gaining more and more traction (Tesla, Square and more committed – next is Apple?), but had not realised…

The main blog discussions this week include … Singapore-on-the-Thames? Welcome to the new London … [Kalifa Review] In the midst of Brexit plans and a Covid pandemic, the UK Government launched a FinTech review chaired by Ron Kalifa. I’ve met Ron at a few conferences, when he was CEO and then Chairman of WorldPay and…

The main blog discussions this week include … The youngsters bucking up the stock markets (that’s bucking with a ‘b’) I was pretty surprised to find that many of Robinhood’s account holders are very young, with an average age of 31. It is probably why they pile into anti-Wall Street stock movements and they are…

The main blog discussions this week include … Breaking the stranglehold of banking Someone asked me to elaborate on the links between banks, government, the economy and society, and this was well illustrated by the video I shared the other day of James Pierpont Morgan, who founded the JPMorgan empire (see end of this blog…

The main blog discussions this week include … Omniaccess is the strategic imperative for the 2020s During the summer and autumn of 2020, I ran an online survey of banks and FinTech firms around their view of physical versus digital access to banking. Obviously, in 2020, digital access to accounts has come to the fore…

The main blog discussions this week include … What’s going on with Crypto? A year ago, I invested $1,000 in bitcoin. Today, that’s worth $10,000. OK, I made those figures up. I actually invested and have invested and keep investing in bitcoin and, more importantly, ether – the currency of Ethereum – in which I…