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When Google Goes Down, Your Bank Goes Down. Who Is Really in Control? We spent decades worrying about banks being too big to fail. Now we have a handful of technology companies that are too important to fail, and yesterday demonstrated why that should terrify us. I’ve recently been blogging and writing about the dangers…

I’ve been a little bit prolific in writing this year, what with two books in Pulp Finction and Intelligent Bank consistently in the top 10 on Amazon. Now, I have one more new book. It started with a question in my head: how come Pharaohs had so much power? It ended with the colonisation of Mars. The new book Who…

You have to laugh. The police spend their lives chasing criminals and now the criminals are stealing their identities to sell cryptocurrency. You really couldn’t make it up. The latest example comes from Ireland, where the Gardaí, the Irish police, have apparently discovered that their social media accounts are rather less secure than the criminals…

There is something wonderfully hypocritical happening in banking this week. American banks have started blocking AI bots from access to customer accounts: ‘You don’t want rogue agents’: Jamie Dimon bars outside AI agents like Meta’s Muse from JPMorgan accounts Citi becomes latest US bank to restrict AI agents from accessing accounts JPMorgan Chase, Citi and…

This week’s blog discussions include … If banks cannot connect their own systems, how can they connect global trade? For years, the global trade conversation has been dominated by one question: where should we move our supply chains? China is risky, America is unpredictable, Europe is expensive and geopolitical tensions are making international commerce look…

I remember presenting to a major global bank twenty years ago about the dangers of social media and particularly Facebook. My thinking was that I could find one of their senior managers in a branch or call centre and discover, through their posts, everything about them. Their phone number, where they live, their partner’s details,…

I was at a presentation last week where a guy from Canada shared the Wealthsimple story. I was not familiar enough with it, although I had heard of them, but the guy showed their advert and it cracked me up. #mustwatch For decades, Canadian banking has been dominated by a handful of powerful institutions with…

I have spent much of the last few years listening to people asking the wrong question about artificial intelligence. Will AI take my job? Will AI replace bankers? Lawyers? Accountants? Programmers? Journalists? Consultants? The question assumes that AI competes with professions. Increasingly, I think it competes with something else entirely: normality. That thought struck me…

Britain is replacing its heroes with wildlife and, judging by the reaction, you would think the Bank of England has announced that Winston Churchill is being retrospectively defeated by a hedgehog. Out go Jane Austen, JMW Turner and Alan Turing and in comes a barn owl, a bumblebee, a puffin and a hedgehog, although the…

Global trade is breaking apart. The winners won’t be the ones who move. They’ll be the ones who connect. For years, the global trade conversation has been dominated by one question: where should we move our supply chains? China is risky, America is unpredictable, Europe is expensive and geopolitical tensions are making international commerce look…