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I gave a keynote this week about my new book called The Intelligent Bank, which is offically launching next week in China! Walking off stage afterwards I realised something quite important: we are no longer debating the future of banking. We are living through it. The problem is that many banks still think the conversation…

There are a number of themes that shape our view of the world. For me, Star Trek and Star Wars and lots of other sci-fi. I love visions of the future from Metropolis to Minority Report. There are others that are meant to frighten us too, such as Alien, The Terminator and Ex Machina. We…

I just discovered that Ben McKenzie is taking the cryptocurrency industry head-on. Many of you will remember Ben from The O.C. but he’s now a little bit more serious. In fact, he wrote a book: Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud. Oh! That sounds a bit challenging, but why would an actor become an anti-crypto…

I’m not big on theology but did stumble across Mammon the other day and am surprised I didn’t know more about this ancient character. He appears in the Bible quite often, and Jesus makes clear that ‘you cannot serve both God and Mammon (Matt 6.24 as well as Luke 16.9, 11 and 13). Mammon promotes the ‘deceitfulness of wealth’…

I was wondering today what would happen if my AI tool sent money to a third party and it was fraudulent. Who would be liable? So, I did a bit of research to find the answer and here it is. The general rule is that it’s your fault, as it’s not the AI that made…

This week’s blog discussions included … Let’s be honest: retail banking is broken Over the past decade, the industry has aggressively optimised for cost and digital efficiency and, in doing so, it has quietly dismantled the human infrastructure that made banking work for millions of people. Start with the facts. In the UK alone, more…

In a new report by Boston Consulting Group, they conclude that the CIO is now the most important role in a bank. Not long ago, the CIO was the person who kept the lights on and kept core systems stable, costs controlled, projects delivered (eventually). That world is gone. According to BCG, the CIO now…

Over the past decade, the industry has aggressively optimised for cost and digital efficiency and, in doing so, it has quietly dismantled the human infrastructure that made banking work for millions of people. Start with the facts. In the UK alone, more than 6,000 bank branches have closed since 2015, according to consumer groups and…

I gave a TEDx talk last year about the jobs our children will have in the future … … and it is a theme I keep returning to because I have twin boys who are ten years old now. The school they go to are now looking for a new Board member, so I wrote…

I’ve just been reading McKinsey’s latest piece about the AI-powered bank. It reads like a polite consulting report, but underneath it is a fairly brutal critique of the entire banking industry because what they’re really saying – without saying it – is that most banks are structurally incapable of benefiting from AI. It not because…