This week’s main blog discussions include …
PayPal, Stripe and Adyen: three companies, three futures
Back in 2021, PayPal was worth around $360 billion. Today it is worth closer to $50 billion. That’s one of the biggest destructions of market value we’ve seen in fintech, and yet it isn’t because the company stopped growing. Quite the opposite. PayPal still moves almost $2 trillion every year, serves around 440 million active…
Living in the age of networked dishonesty
For decades we’ve assumed that technology would make markets more efficient. It has. What we perhaps didn’t anticipate is that it would also make theft, lies and deceit dramatically more efficient. This is illustrated by three completely unrelated stories that caught my attention this week. One examined how consumers are abusing chargeback rules through “friendly…
Technology is the tool to fight poverty
For decades, we’ve treated poverty as an economic problem. Increasingly, I think it’s a technology problem. That sounds like a strange statement until you realise that the single biggest driver of financial inclusion over the past fifty years has not been governments, charities or banks. It has been technology. Governments, banks and charities have spent…
How technology is making disability less disabling
For centuries, we’ve designed the world for the able-bodied and called everyone else disabled. Today, technology is quietly rewriting those rules. It is making finance, communication, work and everyday life adapt to people, rather than forcing people to adapt to systems. Increasingly, I think disability tells us less about the individual than it does about…
One person in seven has no access to formal financial services. One person in six lives with a disability. We normally think of these as two separate inclusion challenges. They are not. They are the same problem. Financial systems were designed around a single type of customer, leaving millions of others behind. For decades, financial…
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...