Digital Bank

I was in a conversation with a bank executive talking about innovation.   We all know the Catch-22 in a bank: you want to be innovative, but only as long as there’s no risk but, with any innovation, there has to be risk.  You can play in the sandbox like little …

I was talking with a few FinTech firms the other day. They are all fully licensed banks, and are less than 15 years old. They all seem to have one thing in common: refreshment. What I mean by this is that they talk about technology in a very different way …

I enjoyed this article in the Evening Standard by Melanie McDonagh and thought I would share it here, to see what reaction it gets. The loss of our high-street banks will make us all poorer — but not financially If you have tears, reader, prepare to shed them now. My bank in Berkeley …

Just found an interesting document from Harvard Business Review with the title: How financial services views the digital agenda. It is the result of research conducted by the Harvard Business Review with the Genpact Research Institute, looking at the impact of digitalisation in finance, and confirms something I have been …

I was talking to a group of Treasury folks and the guy before me gave a pitch about the CFO of the future.  The pitch focused upon how the CFO would be managing risk, incorporating different technologies, managing M&A, dealing with globalisation and so on and so forth.  I couldn’t …

I was struck by some commentary with John Cryan, the CEO of Deutsche Bank, over on Bloomberg. The article is talking about the wild ride he has had since taking over the helm of the bank which had formerly been run by two CEOs (Juergen Fitschen and Anshu Jain). He …

I recently appeared on an interview with Salesforce’s LeadingEdge webcast. Afterwards, they picked out 12 statements I made that they thought particularly noteworthy, so thought I would repost them here: 12 Noteworthy Quotes on the Future of Banking The digital revolution is fundamentally impacting every industry across the board, and …

There’s an old joke about the guy who’s lost driving in the countryside who stops to ask a pedestrian how to get to the city.  The pedestrian replies: “oh, if you want to get there, I wouldn’t start from here”, and this is exactly how banks feel today.  They want …

One of the presentations I particularly enjoyed at the EFMA meeting was from Gürhan Çam, Senior Vice President- Digital Banking at DenizBank, Turkey.  You will all know by now that I love the innovations in retail banking in Turkey, and Gürhan didn’t disappoint. First, there is the fastPay Wallet.  With …

I just attended an EFMA conference where the opening presentation talked about the most innovative banks in the world. They may or may not be, you can decide, as I’m posting some of their stories here.  These are the ones I quite liked, so it’s not exhaustive. See what you think …

One company that is seeking global domination is Ant Financial. The company has an open stated intention to reach two billion users by 2025.  The way in which they’ll achieve that is through local partnerships, and many of those have been started already: Ant Financial invests in Thailand’s Ascend Money …

I got to thinking about yesterday’s post on humanity in part due to a discussion of global banking.  Global, universal banking was the mantra of the 2000s and HSBC, Citi, Bank of America, BNP Paribas, Deutsche and more were all jumping on the bandwagon.  After the global financial crisis, they …

Building on yesterday’s blog, Money2020 has an official Money Magazine to go with the European show, produced by Norfico.  I was picked as one of a few commentators to talk about what’s going on in the world and was featured in the magazine, which you can find and download here. …

The British Bankers’ Association released their The Way We Bank annual report last Thursday. It was interesting. Here are the key highlights: Over the past five years customers’ activity on banking apps rocketed by 354%, with apps now an increasingly popular way to access current accounts rising from 21% of …

After my blog yesterday, about banks having to move from being control freaks in a proprietary operation building everything to becoming collaborative partners in an open marketplace curating everything, I was asked: “how do you make money out of curation?” It’s a good question, as marketplace curators make money very …