Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

Is Wise dumb?

For years, fintech has sold a compelling story, particularly Wise. Their message? Banks are slow. Banks are expensive. Banks are burdened by legacy systems and bureaucracy. Technology can move money faster, cheaper and more transparently. Source: Wise But today, Wise faces a €500 million potential fine for breaching money laundering rules. What’s going on? Originally…

How crypto is reshaping governments

For the last twenty years, I have had many arguments with crypto advocates about Liberterian versus State governance. Now, the crypto guys are the government. During those years, people worried that politics would be captured by Wall Street, Big Oil or Big Tech, but the emerging power bloc is crypto money and artificial intelligence.  These…

The ECB is worried that stablecoins will make the euro irrelevant

The European Central Bank just published a speech by Isabel Schnabel, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB and, underneath all the central banker language, is a pretty simple message: stablecoins are starting to look less like a crypto experiment and more like a new form of private money. More importantly, because stablecoins are…

The Finanser’s Week: 25th May – 31st May 2026

This week’s main blog discussions include … “Intelligent Bank” is officially launched I spent last week in China with Huawei. It was fantastic and, finally, it gave me the chance to announce and release my new book Intelligent Bank. Regular blog readers will know that I’ve been talking about this as the third fintech revolution but I…

AI is just a calculator for Gen Alpha

We are living through the third great revolution in modern business. The first revolution automated administration through mainframes and databases. The second digitised services through smartphones, apps, APIs and cloud. The third revolution is now intelligence: machines that can write, analyse, reason, create and increasingly act on our behalf. That is why so many people…

The tech behind intelligent banking

The key thrust of my new book is the intelligence revolution. More on that tomorrow but the basics are that we are living through the third technology revolution of finance and banking. The first began with automating the mundane with mainframes from the 1950s onwards (back office efficiencies fifty years ago); moving to making the…

Becoming intelligent: the next wave of disruption

I was thinking more about this third revolution of financial technologies. The first was very much focused upon automation administration using mainframe computing;  the second moved from pure cost reduction to the changing dynamics of how to leverage productivity and cost using the network effects of connectivity, and driven by cloud and mobile; the third…

What is an AI-native bank?

Now that Intelligent Bank has finally launched during my trip to China with Hauwei, here is more about what it means, as written by an AI friend … Intelligent Bank: The Third Financial Technology Revolution argues that banking is entering a third major era of technological change. The first revolution was automation, driven by mainframes, SWIFT, Visa…

“Intelligent Bank” is officially launched

I spent last week in China with Huawei. It was fantastic and, finally, it gave me the chance to announce and release my new book Intelligent Bank. Regular blog readers will know that I’ve been talking about this as the third fintech revolution but I could not officially tell everyone that it was released until today! Here is…

The Finanser’s Week: 18th May – 24th May 2026

This week’s main blog discussions include … What banks are doing with AI The funny thing about AI in banking is that the headlines are completely wrong. Every week there’s another breathless prediction claiming that AI will “replace banks”, “eliminate core systems” or “create autonomous financial institutions”. Reading these articles, you would think that we…