Technology

I need to shut up about Ant Group, as I’ve blogged a lot about them lately. However, with an IPO coming up and news coming out daily almost, it’s hard to ignore some of their activities. One activity that really hit me when it was released in July was the rebranding of all of their…

This week’s blogs are inspired by our global connector Marisol Menendez In the second of this week’s interviews with firms who were winners of our Nordic Connection Festival, I spoke with Siam Choudhury, Co-founder and CEO of Pliance, an anti-money laundering solution. To begin with Siam, tell me a bit about what you guys get…

This week’s blogs are inspired by our global connector Marisol Menendez As mentioned, this week is a little different and, in the first of three interviews with entries in our Nordic Connection Festival during the summer, I interviewed Davyde Wachell, founder and CEO of Responsive AI … Tell me about Responsive and what you guys…

I’ve seen a few big deals signed this month to get banks onto the cloud, such as National Australia Bank (NAB) switching to Microsoft’s Azure, and Deutsche Bank moving to the Google Cloud. McKinsey expect that cloud usage will rise from less than a quarter of banks business being cloud-based to anything between 40 and 90…

I blog regularly about what a fanboy I am of Chinese technology giants Alibaba and Tencent. It’s getting a bit ridiculous now however, when payments companies are designing payments for cats and dogs … or maybe it’s not … it’s just an extension of technologies that work for humans. My last blog on this subject…

OK, no more politics … unless it’s important to banking, technology and fintech … and back to my usual boring diatribes. There’s been a discussion a while ago about making banking fun, gamifying finance and giving rewards for smart spending and saving. I was an advocate of such ideas, but now I’m not so sure. I’m…

I got a chart this week that made me smile. This is it … In one month, retail sales jumped massively from 16% to 27% of all sales. The end of main street is nigh. Other facts and figures that made me smile were Amazon’s retail sales jumping 26% in Q1 2020, Zoom moving from…

I remember some years ago that Nikolas Sarkozy wanted to bring in a law that would force call centre operators to tell French citizens where they were located, due to the backlash over offshore call centres. I wonder what he would make of today’s world, where most French and European banks have given all their…

The non-stop coverage of coronavirus, global markets slumping, an economic armageddon, the end of the world due to a climate emergency, the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice, rising of the oceans, weather fatalities, a farce of a US election, the UK and EU in a stand-off over Brexit, the cancellation of the Olympics…

Really interesting interview with Garry Kasparov in Wired magazine about the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in the future. Garry Kasparov is perhaps the greatest chess player in history. For almost two decades after becoming world champion in 1985, he dominated the game. Then, in 1997, at the height of his powers, Kasparov was crushed by an…