Technology

Jul 26, 2011

Alipay: innovation in banking is a good thing

Going back to my discussions in Asia last week, I am intrigued by the results of the interactive voting we performed. I asked a number of questions last week, and have already blogged about one of them: Do you agree that innovation can only be delivered by a CEO or equivalent mandate? Yes – 49%…

Jul 26, 2011

Alipay: innovation in banking is a good thing

Jul 12, 2011

Massive innovations in payments … not?

Just been through a meeting on payments and all areas of payments from SEPA to Basel III, corporates and trade, risk and liquidity, innovation and change and more. My role was to talk about all things that I see as innovative in payments right now. That’s a long list and so, in the interests of…

Jul 7, 2011

Banks are like a 1,000 mph car

Talking about risk and innovation in creating the world’s first 1,000 miles per hour (mph) car, is like talking about changing the core systems in a retail bank. You just don’t do it or, if you’re going to try, it’s incredibly tough and challenging. In fact, in retail banks, it’s even more challenging as the…

Jul 7, 2011

Banks are like a 1,000 mph car

Jul 5, 2011

How Facebook Credits could replace traditional banking

I just made a comment this week about Facebook Credits being bigger than Amazon by 2020. This was on the back of my favourite stories about Zynga becoming the biggest PayPal merchant in under a year on the back of Facebook games, and how QQ and Second Life currencies have been examples of how virtual currencies can…

Jul 5, 2011

How Facebook Credits could replace traditional banking

Jun 30, 2011

How banks can beat the telco’s at the mobile game

In the 1990s, I spent a long time studying bank trends and the future strategies banks and other would take. The conclusion I came to is that there would be a general cross-industry bank trend, where non-banks would enter banking and, in order to get banking skills, would acquire banks. The end-game would be that…

Jun 21, 2011

A mass of social media and web 2.0 stats

I like numbers and haven't posted any for a while. So I was pleased to find a bunch of useful social stats while crawling the net the other day. These stats starkly put into context why social networking and social media is important. It's important in all walks of life, especially finance which is…

Jun 20, 2011

Now it’s an eyePhone

Talking about iris recognition and passwords recently, I got a note from Spanish Bank, Bankinter, which has just launched an app that identifies clients through iris recognition on the phone. The way it works is that customers access their brokerage accounts by blinking into their smartphone’s camera. The app has algorithms built-in that look for eye…