This week’s main blog discussions include …
Crypto wanted to get rid of banks. Now they are banks.
When Bitcoin launched in 2008, the whole idea was to get rid of banks and intermediaries. In 2026, they’ve learned the lesson I learnt years ago. That’s how the world works. You need intermediaries. The whole idea of bitcoin is that money can move from person to person, ownership could be established cryptographically and the…
For decades, the architecture of money was reasonably easy to understand. Banks held the money, central banks sat at the heart of national monetary systems, card networks connected merchants and consumers, and SWIFT connected banks across borders. It was complicated behind the scenes, but the basic structure had been remarkably stable for years. Then the…
Today’s banking system is radically different to yesterday’s
I love this chart. Source: Avinash Kumar on LinkedIn Not because it is perfect. It isn’t. No ecosystem chart ever is, and this one shows the companies as examples rather than an exhaustive list. I love it because it takes something I have been writing about for years and makes it visible. We keep talking…
Are tech firms now running our financial systems?
For years, banks have worried about technology companies eating their lunch. Fintech would destroy banking. BigTech would become banking. Digital wallets would disintermediate banks. Cryptocurrencies would replace banks. Stablecoins would replace deposits. Decentralised finance would replace everything. None of that quite happened. Now we have artificial intelligence and, this time, there may be a very…
Fintech isn’t disrupting banking … it’s eating it
Something interesting is happening in fintech, and I think we may need to stop talking about fintech as though it is an industry sitting somewhere alongside banking. For most of the past twenty years, that distinction made sense because there were banks and there were fintech companies trying to disrupt particular parts of what banks…
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...