Technology

We had our first 2020 meetings of Nordic Finance Innovation last week. The theme was digital transformation and its implementation, and was co-hosted by our partner Swedbank. One of the slides struck me as particularly noteworthy. It came from a presentation by Stephan Erne, Chief Digital Officer at Handelsbanken, in reference to artificial intelligence (AI)….

I bumped into a real API marketplace the other day. Just what I’ve been looking for … … but not sure why they’re opening physical stores pic.twitter.com/NaUUiyQ4lK — Chris Skinner (@Chris_Skinner) February 17, 2020 It gained a few nice comments like: “So people could stock up on spaghetti code and sandbox toys” from Alex Kuznetsov;…

I often talk about how banks have five times more regulation than technology firms. That stat comes from Bank of America Merrill Lynch who published this chart a while ago: This is confirmed by similar charts, such as this one from Benedict Evans, a Partner at the firm Andreessen Horowitz, who just shared his Davos…

Regular readers of the blog know that I’m a fanboy of Alibaba and their financial firm Ant Financial which operates Alipay, the major payments system of China. On November 11, they had their Singles Day jamboree. The equivalent in China of Black Friday, some say, but more than five times bigger*. The figures this year…

I’ve said for a while that the Big Tech giants will not become banks. Amazon and Alibaba will do a lot of bank-like activities, but they will never move into full-service banking, as in offering deposit accounts. Why won’t they? Because that’s full banking activity which has all of the audit and compliance overhead that…

I was talking with a senior banker, who told me that he was in charge of the Artificial Intelligence program in the bank. I was impressed as he is part of the executive leadership team of the bank and not the CIO. We have invested widely across the board in AI, he told me, and…

The main blog headlines are … Where Top US Banks Are Betting On Fintech After yesterday’s article about how backward America is, in terms of payments, there’s a useful article talking about how they’re trying to rectify this. Bearing in mind that the big American banks are all spending $10 billion plus each on technology,…

After yesterday’s article about how backward America is, in terms of payments, there’s a useful article talking about how they’re trying to rectify this. Bearing in mind that the big American banks are all spending $10 billion plus each on technology, they should be updating, and CB Insights latest installment looks at where the top American…

I just picked up a Financial Times article talking about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will change the way you deal with money. It’s actually more about the Chinese internet giant Ping An, and how they’re changing finance using AI. If you are a customer of Chinese financial services group Ping An, you can use a new…

I thought I would share my speech at last week’s UN meeting and the short version is summarised nicely by the UN’s press page: Chris Skinner, an author and commentator from the United Kingdom, discussed the promise of “fintech” — which integrates finance and technology — to extend financial services to more people in ways…