Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

The Finanser’s Week: 7th July – 13th July 2025

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This week’s main blog discussions include …

Fintech and the Rule of 40

A colleague posted a view about Fintech and the Rule of 40 the other day. What is the Rule of 40? The Rule of 40 is a financial metric, primarily used in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry, which suggests a healthy company’s combined revenue growth rate and profit margin (often measured by EBITDA) should equal or…

Monzo suffer a stumble after opening fake accounts for 10 Downing Street and more

Monzo allowed customers to open accounts from everywhere including Buckingham Palace … with no authentication Digital bank Monzo has just been fined £21 million by the UK regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), after onboarding customers claiming to live at 10 Downing Street, Buckingham Palace and even its own premises. A lack of address verification…

I live at Buckingham Palace but am secretly a Russian launderer

Building on yesterday’s blog about onboarding me as a client based in Buckingham Palace – or was that 10 Downing Street? – there is some interesting reporting about Revolut. Why haven’t they got their UK credit license sorted? After several years of discussion with the regulators, they finally got the green light to launch a…

Agentic finance – the customer is in control

Agentic finance. What is that? For me, it is where you can designate your financial life to an intelligent, connected network. The core of that network is: who are you? There is you and then there is your digital twin. There are two you’s: the physical you and the digital you. So we have to…

The future of money movement is not just APIs and open banking … it’s agentic finance

I just received an interesting report by Deloitte about API Banking and Banking-as-a-Service … the things I talked about back in the 2000s. The report is called the future of money movement, although I would argue it is the present of money movement along with embedded finance and open banking, which are also mentioned in the report.

The billionaires who control your lives, and Elon’s vision for the future

WARNING: THIS BLOG IS POLITICAL

I often talk about the tech billionaires who control our lives. Why blog about this today? Well, a few disturbing developments. One is Elon Musk – you probably already know about his issues – thinking of launching a new American political party; but the other, and more intriguing, is an interview with Peter Thiel in The New York Times. You can watch it here, and it is also transcribed.

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Chris M Skinner

Chris Skinner is best known as an independent commentator on the financial markets through his blog, TheFinanser.com, as author of the bestselling book Digital Bank, and Chair of the European networking forum the Financial Services Club. He has been voted one of the most influential people in banking by The Financial Brand (as well as one of the best blogs), a FinTech Titan (Next Bank), one of the Fintech Leaders you need to follow (City AM, Deluxe and Jax Finance), as well as one of the Top 40 most influential people in financial technology by the Wall Street Journal's Financial News. To learn more click here...