Opinion

I used to blog about blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) almost once a week … four years ago. Today, I hardly blog about it at all. I guess it just shows what’s top of mind and what’s not at any time in FinTech and, right now, blockchain is not top of mind. In fact,…

For many years, banks have talked about moving away from transactions and towards advice. The branch is for advice. We will become trusted advisors. We see the value-add of banking is the information we can analyse around your data to offer advice. Complete rubbish. I’m sorry, but I’ve towed that line for a long time…

I was about to write a really nice piece about Apple’s announcement of the launch of a new credit card, in partnership with Goldman Sachs, when Brian Roemmele beat me to it. Who is Brian Roemmele you ask? And if you are asking that … WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? Brian is a great speaker and prolific…

So, I blogged last week about women in FinTech and whether we care, and got lots of replies … from women … who said yes, we care. Interesting that there were not so many replies from the other gender, but hey what do you expect? One interesting insight is that the future of work will…

Watching the debacle of the #Brexit debate in Britain, you might think that the UK is in a national meltdown. According to a survey on the front of Metro this week, 9 out of 10 Brits think that the political handling of Brexit is a national humiliation. I must admit that, watching this from the…

One of the greatest challenges in digital transformation is the cultural change, that has to be led with passion and commitment from the top-down. As I’ve already mentioned, that means a Board mandate and the Chair and CEO being fully on board. But what about the C-team? And the level that reports to the C-team?…

A year ago I blogged about invisible banking and that I have some issues with it, namely that the bank brand disappears and the customer finds it too easy to spend without thinking. Now, I read more and more about embedded banking, contextual banking, frictionless banking and more, and I think people have got this…

I can understand why bankers can be sceptical about what technologists say. For years, technologists have been telling them that their business is threatened by technological change. They’ve been shouting that they will be disintermediated; they say that the bank must change and change fast to keep up; they argue that the bank is not…

I got a large number of pings over the weekend to read and comment on an article on Medium by Lance Ng headlined: Facebook Plans to Become World’s Biggest Central Bank? It is a conjectured article that takes the story from The New York Times discussing Facebook creating its own cryptocurrency (Facebook and Telegram Are…

This is an old but true story of my very own. Back in the day, I worked for a computer firm that had a unique piece of hardware and software called the Contents Addressable File Store, or CAFS for short. I was the marketing manager for this remarkable piece of technology and, for the benefit…