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For decades we’ve assumed that technology would make markets more efficient. It has. What we perhaps didn’t anticipate is that it would also make theft, lies and deceit dramatically more efficient. This is illustrated by three completely unrelated stories that caught my attention this week. One examined how consumers are abusing chargeback rules through “friendly…

One person in seven has no access to formal financial services. One person in six lives with a disability. We normally think of these as two separate inclusion challenges. They are not. They are the same problem. Financial systems were designed around a single type of customer, leaving millions of others behind. For decades, financial…

For centuries, we’ve designed the world for the able-bodied and called everyone else disabled. Today, technology is quietly rewriting those rules. It is making finance, communication, work and everyday life adapt to people, rather than forcing people to adapt to systems. Increasingly, I think disability tells us less about the individual than it does about…

For decades, we’ve treated poverty as an economic problem. Increasingly, I think it’s a technology problem. That sounds like a strange statement until you realise that the single biggest driver of financial inclusion over the past fifty years has not been governments, charities or banks. It has been technology. Governments, banks and charities have spent…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Banks exist because trust doesn’t scale Some days, the financial news seems to have nothing whatsoever in common but yesterday there were four stories where I saw a link. The first is a US senator demanding answers from Barclays over Jes Staley’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Then there…

Some days, the financial news seems to have nothing whatsoever in common but yesterday there were four stories where I saw a link. The first is a US senator demanding answers from Barclays over Jes Staley’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Then there are UK banks are facing political scrutiny for restricting customers from making crypto…

Building on my story about banks win wars, not soldiers, there have been two interesting headlines over the last week: Half a million Russians go bankrupt as Putin risks banking crisis Russians turn to cash putting more strain on slowing wartime economy The stories boil down to the fact that the Russian economy is bust….

Andy Burnham’s first day in power started on Monday and, immediately, as the new Prime Minister of Britain, Jamie Dimon, CEO and Chair of JPMorgan Chase gives him an ultimatum: increase our taxes and we’re off. JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon warns of ‘consequences’ if Andy Burnham taxes banks Dimon casts doubt over JP Morgan’s London…

I was recently interviewed for a podcast about Agentic AI in payments and finance. Here’s how the interview went: You’ve been writing and speaking about agentic commerce for a while. When did it click for you that this wasn’t just another tech buzzword. What was the moment you thought, “this one is real”? The answer…

There are moments in technology when something shifts so fundamentally that the existing infrastructure suddenly looks like it belongs to another era. We saw it with the internet, when pages became platforms. We saw it with smartphones, when every business suddenly needed an app. Now we’re seeing it again as artificial intelligence moves from answering…