Welcome to The Finanser by Chris Skinner. The Finanser discusses all things fintech, finance, banking, technology and, most importantly, the future. Chris Skinner has been voted the most influential technologist in Britain and received a lifetime achievement award for his visionary approach to the future of money from the Payments Association. He has advised the…
Read More
“The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart.” — Metropolis, 1927 I have been affected by the film Metropolis for as long as I can remember. Made in 1927 by Fritz Lang, it is almost a century old and yet, whenever I watch it, I wonder whether we have learned anything…
Read More
I recently delivered a keynote at Visa Next in Poland exploring the future of money, payments and banking. From the technological revolutions that created today’s financial system to the arrival of AI-native banking, the industry faces a fundamental question: are we using technology to make banking better for customers, or just cheaper for banks? Here’s…
Read More
I was thinking about trickledown economics and tax, as it seems to be debated in the news almost daily. The core debate is whether to tax the rich more or less and the answer depends upon whether you are right or left of centre. This is why every election falls into the same argument. One…
Read More
I have always thought insurance has a marketing problem. You buy something you hope you will never use, pay for something whose value may not become apparent for decades and, with life assurance, buy a product whose payout you will not even be around to enjoy. It is hardly surprising that insurers have spent more…
Read More
I recently delivered a keynote at Visa Next in Poland exploring the future of money, payments and banking. From the technological revolutions that created today’s financial system to the arrival of AI-native banking, the industry faces a fundamental question: are we using technology to make banking better for customers, or just cheaper for banks? Here’s…
Read MoreFrom Mt. Gox to Bybit and now Binance, cryptocurrency exchanges have lost billions to hackers. The technology works, so why do the institutions keep failing? If a bank lost $6.36 billion in minutes, there would be outrage, regulatory investigations, demands for resignations and questions about whether the institution should be allowed to continue operating. When…
Read MoreFor years, we have been told that digital makes everything better by making everything faster, cheaper and easier, and that the ultimate objective should be a world in which we can click here, tap there, buy now, pay later and complete the whole process without thinking about it. The great mantra of digital commerce has…
Read More
The Bank of England has released its latest report on artificial intelligence in financial services. The numbers are impressive. The reality is less so. Banks are embracing AI at extraordinary speed, but are they transforming banking or just making yesterday’s banking cheaper? The Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority have just published their latest…
Read More
We gave them our data, our money, our businesses and now our intelligence. In return, they gave us convenience. Nobody asked who would end up controlling the world. I have been thinking a lot about the Google Cloud outage this week and the fact that a power failure in a London data centre disrupted banking…
Read More
When Google Goes Down, Your Bank Goes Down. Who Is Really in Control? We spent decades worrying about banks being too big to fail. Now we have a handful of technology companies that are too important to fail, and yesterday demonstrated why that should terrify us. I’ve recently been blogging and writing about the dangers…
Read More
You have to laugh. The police spend their lives chasing criminals and now the criminals are stealing their identities to sell cryptocurrency. You really couldn’t make it up. The latest example comes from Ireland, where the Gardaí, the Irish police, have apparently discovered that their social media accounts are rather less secure than the criminals…
Read More
There is something wonderfully hypocritical happening in banking this week. American banks have started blocking AI bots from access to customer accounts: ‘You don’t want rogue agents’: Jamie Dimon bars outside AI agents like Meta’s Muse from JPMorgan accounts Citi becomes latest US bank to restrict AI agents from accessing accounts JPMorgan Chase, Citi and…
Read More
I was at a presentation last week where a guy from Canada shared the Wealthsimple story. I was not familiar enough with it, although I had heard of them, but the guy showed their advert and it cracked me up. #mustwatch For decades, Canadian banking has been dominated by a handful of powerful institutions with…
Read MoreI recently delivered a keynote at Visa Next in Poland exploring the future of money, payments and banking. From the technological revolutions that created today’s financial system to the arrival of AI-native banking, the industry faces a fundamental question: are we using technology to make banking better for customers, or just cheaper for banks? Here’s…
Read MoreFrom Mt. Gox to Bybit and now Binance, cryptocurrency exchanges have lost billions to hackers. The technology works, so why do the institutions keep failing? If a bank lost $6.36 billion in minutes, there would be outrage, regulatory investigations, demands for resignations and questions about whether the institution should be allowed to continue operating. When…
Read MoreFor years, we have been told that digital makes everything better by making everything faster, cheaper and easier, and that the ultimate objective should be a world in which we can click here, tap there, buy now, pay later and complete the whole process without thinking about it. The great mantra of digital commerce has…
Read MoreThe Bank of England has released its latest report on artificial intelligence in financial services. The numbers are impressive. The reality is less so. Banks are embracing AI at extraordinary speed, but are they transforming banking or just making yesterday’s banking cheaper? The Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority have just published their latest…
Read MoreWe gave them our data, our money, our businesses and now our intelligence. In return, they gave us convenience. Nobody asked who would end up controlling the world. I have been thinking a lot about the Google Cloud outage this week and the fact that a power failure in a London data centre disrupted banking…
Read MoreWhen Google Goes Down, Your Bank Goes Down. Who Is Really in Control? We spent decades worrying about banks being too big to fail. Now we have a handful of technology companies that are too important to fail, and yesterday demonstrated why that should terrify us. I’ve recently been blogging and writing about the dangers…
Read MoreYou have to laugh. The police spend their lives chasing criminals and now the criminals are stealing their identities to sell cryptocurrency. You really couldn’t make it up. The latest example comes from Ireland, where the Gardaí, the Irish police, have apparently discovered that their social media accounts are rather less secure than the criminals…
Read MoreThere is something wonderfully hypocritical happening in banking this week. American banks have started blocking AI bots from access to customer accounts: ‘You don’t want rogue agents’: Jamie Dimon bars outside AI agents like Meta’s Muse from JPMorgan accounts Citi becomes latest US bank to restrict AI agents from accessing accounts JPMorgan Chase, Citi and…
Read MoreI was at a presentation last week where a guy from Canada shared the Wealthsimple story. I was not familiar enough with it, although I had heard of them, but the guy showed their advert and it cracked me up. #mustwatch For decades, Canadian banking has been dominated by a handful of powerful institutions with…
Read MoreFrom Mt. Gox to Bybit and now Binance, cryptocurrency exchanges have lost billions to hackers. The technology works, so why do the institutions keep failing? If a bank lost $6.36 billion in minutes, there would be outrage, regulatory investigations, demands for resignations and questions about whether the institution should be allowed to continue operating. When…
Read More
Pig-butchering crypto scams are a serious and growing problem in St. Louis, Missouri, and across the United States. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reported that Americans lost $9.3 billion to cryptocurrency-related fraud in 2024, marking a 66% increase from the prior year. Pig butchering schemes accounted for roughly $5.8 billion of those losses….
Read MoreYou have to laugh. The police spend their lives chasing criminals and now the criminals are stealing their identities to sell cryptocurrency. You really couldn’t make it up. The latest example comes from Ireland, where the Gardaí, the Irish police, have apparently discovered that their social media accounts are rather less secure than the criminals…
Read More
I have spent much of the last few years listening to people asking the wrong question about artificial intelligence. Will AI take my job? Will AI replace bankers? Lawyers? Accountants? Programmers? Journalists? Consultants? The question assumes that AI competes with professions. Increasingly, I think it competes with something else entirely: normality. That thought struck me…
Read More
Have we all gone completely mad? Seriously. We live in a world where people struggle to pay their mortgages, governments drown in debt, banks worry about inflation and central bankers agonise over interest rates. Meanwhile, a piece of cardboard featuring a cartoon monster can be worth more than most people earn in their entire lives….
Read More
The interesting story is no longer simply whether bitcoin goes to $50,000, $100,000 or $500,000, but whether the technologies created around crypto are becoming the foundations of a new financial system. If that is right, it raises a much bigger question: what is the money in that system? For most of our lives, the answer…
Read More
There are always two sides to a coin and, right now, the two sides of our technological future could hardly look more different. On the one side are the technologists who want us to build more, compute more, automate more and move faster. Artificial intelligence will transform everything, robots will do much of the work,…
Read More
I have spent this week looking at the systemic implications of AI, cloud and digital currencies, but there is an obvious question left hanging over all of this. If you are the CEO of a bank or fintech, what are you supposed to do about it? The answer is not to become an expert in…
Read More
Digital money doesn’t have a passport. For millenia, money has been organised around geography. The dollar belongs to America, sterling to Britain, the euro to Europe and the yen to Japan. Banks are licensed nationally, central banks provide national monetary anchors, governments guarantee deposits nationally and regulators supervise institutions largely through national legal frameworks. Digital…
Read More“The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart.” — Metropolis, 1927 I have been affected by the film Metropolis for as long as I can remember. Made in 1927 by Fritz Lang, it is almost a century old and yet, whenever I watch it, I wonder whether we have learned anything…
Read MoreI recently delivered a keynote at Visa Next in Poland exploring the future of money, payments and banking. From the technological revolutions that created today’s financial system to the arrival of AI-native banking, the industry faces a fundamental question: are we using technology to make banking better for customers, or just cheaper for banks? Here’s…
Read MoreFrom Mt. Gox to Bybit and now Binance, cryptocurrency exchanges have lost billions to hackers. The technology works, so why do the institutions keep failing? If a bank lost $6.36 billion in minutes, there would be outrage, regulatory investigations, demands for resignations and questions about whether the institution should be allowed to continue operating. When…
Read MoreFor years, we have been told that digital makes everything better by making everything faster, cheaper and easier, and that the ultimate objective should be a world in which we can click here, tap there, buy now, pay later and complete the whole process without thinking about it. The great mantra of digital commerce has…
Read MoreThe Bank of England has released its latest report on artificial intelligence in financial services. The numbers are impressive. The reality is less so. Banks are embracing AI at extraordinary speed, but are they transforming banking or just making yesterday’s banking cheaper? The Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority have just published their latest…
Read MoreWhen Google Goes Down, Your Bank Goes Down. Who Is Really in Control? We spent decades worrying about banks being too big to fail. Now we have a handful of technology companies that are too important to fail, and yesterday demonstrated why that should terrify us. I’ve recently been blogging and writing about the dangers…
Read More
I’ve been a little bit prolific in writing this year, what with two books in Pulp Finction and Intelligent Bank consistently in the top 10 on Amazon. Now, I have one more new book. It started with a question in my head: how come Pharaohs had so much power? It ended with the colonisation of Mars. The new book Who…
Read MoreThere is something wonderfully hypocritical happening in banking this week. American banks have started blocking AI bots from access to customer accounts: ‘You don’t want rogue agents’: Jamie Dimon bars outside AI agents like Meta’s Muse from JPMorgan accounts Citi becomes latest US bank to restrict AI agents from accessing accounts JPMorgan Chase, Citi and…
Read MoreI was at a presentation last week where a guy from Canada shared the Wealthsimple story. I was not familiar enough with it, although I had heard of them, but the guy showed their advert and it cracked me up. #mustwatch For decades, Canadian banking has been dominated by a handful of powerful institutions with…
Read MoreThings we’re reading today include … Hackers Paid $15 to Drain $2.5 Billion From Binance in One Hit Binance hack prompted US regulators to check in on bank systems, sources say Paraguayan president resigns amid bank collapse leaving 3M people without access to bank accounts What is Ueno Bank and how did it trigger Paraguay’s…
Read MoreThings we’re reading today include … How The Midterm Elections Could Reshape Fintech Regulation What Democrats’ midterm victory means for your crypto investments French bank says cyberattack stole around $100 mn Starling Bank chief to step down after just two years UBS slashes spending on consultants as Credit Suisse project winds down HSBC shakes…
Read MoreThings we’re reading today include … Hackers behind $6.3bn Binance heist ‘used malware and bogus job interviews’ British fintech Revolut slashes AI coding costs 10x by cutting out Claude and going self-hosted Bank of England orders review of Revolut product approvals The Little-Known Chinese Bank in the Middle of Iranian and Russian Money Flows Where…
Read MoreThings we’re reading today include … Binance says it has recovered 95% of $6.3B North Korean crypto hack North Korean Hackers Stole Billions, the F.B.I. Says. It’s Not Their First Heist North Korea denies being behind $6.3bn Binance crypto hack The Future of Global Payments Is an Operating System Banks must prepare for quantum threat…
Read MoreThings we’re reading today include … Binance resumes customer withdrawals after record $6.3bn hack Binance hack: Users withdraw $3.6bn after record crypto heist Cloned websites are in the EU’s draft payment rules How the Bank of England’s CBDC Plans Could Reshape Payments How Poland’s Central Bank Is Caught in Political Standoff With PM Donald Tusk…
Read MoreThis week’s main blog discussions include … Is digital making people switch off? For years, we have been told that digital makes everything better by making everything faster, cheaper and easier, and that the ultimate objective should be a world in which we can click here, tap there, buy now, pay later and complete the…
Read MoreThings we’re reading today include … North Korea Steals USD 6.36 Billion From Binance in the Largest Hack in History Bitcoin market in chaos amid fears Binance crypto exchange has been hit by biggest hack in history Bank of England sets out approach to tokenised collateral in central clearing Lagarde quits European Central Bank ahead…
Read MoreThings we’re reading today include: Fintech: Europe’s 10 most-funded companies in H1 2026 SoFi earnings breakdown – The fintech bank story heading into 2026 Monzo Opens in Spain in Fintech’s Latest European Expansion Deutsche Bank’s Bankim Chadha on why the firm downgraded tech World Bank Forecasts 23% 2026 Commodity Price Rise Amid Supply Shocks Ahmedabad…
Read MoreThis week’s main blog discussions include … Is digital making people switch off? For years, we have been told that digital makes everything better by making everything faster, cheaper and easier, and that the ultimate objective should be a world in which we can click here, tap there, buy now, pay later and complete the…
Read MoreThis week’s main blog discussions include … I can see clearly now the clouds have gone When Google Goes Down, Your Bank Goes Down. Who Is Really in Control? We spent decades worrying about banks being too big to fail. Now we have a handful of technology companies that are too important to fail, and…
Read MoreThis week’s blog discussions include … If banks cannot connect their own systems, how can they connect global trade? For years, the global trade conversation has been dominated by one question: where should we move our supply chains? China is risky, America is unpredictable, Europe is expensive and geopolitical tensions are making international commerce look…
Read More
This week’s main blog discussions include … AI and the big question: why would you ever call McKinsey or Gartner? For many years, McKinsey has been the go-to firm for advice and Gartner for research but, with AI, why bother? In fact, there is a lot of debate about whether AI will replace consultants and…
Read MoreThis week’s main blog discussions include … What’s really happening with Nubank? Nubank wants to go global but not like Revolut. Everyone assumes Nubank wants to be like the next Revolut. They’re wrong. Revolut wants to build one financial superapp for the world. Nubank is building something different: a global banking empire that does not…
Read More
This week’s main blog discussions include … How many employees does it take to create $1 billion of value? I was looking at some numbers comparing the world’s biggest banks with the world’s biggest fintech firms and realised that we may have been measuring the wrong thing. We normally compare banks and fintechs by customers,…
Read MoreThis week’s main blog discussions include … What the FinTech Book Club thinks of “Intelligent Bank” The FinTech Book Club recently devoted its discussion to my latest book Intelligent Bank, and the overall reaction was strongly positive. That was a relief as I’m a good friend of these guys, but that does not make them…
Read MoreThis week’s main blog discussions include … 25 years after 9/11: An attack on America, capitalism or the world? On Tuesday, 11th September 2001, I was flying back from Nice, France, after a conference. We arrived home and switched on the television. What we saw was horrific. At 8:46 that morning in New York, 13:46…
Read MoreThis week’s main blog discussions include … The true cost of AI (Part One) There is a rather awkward conversation beginning in boardrooms about artificial intelligence. For the last few years, the question has been what AI can do, how quickly companies can deploy it and how many people it might replace, but the question…
Read MoreThis week’s main blog discussions include … The SWOT of AI in banking I was sitting this morning and thinking about how fantastic Agentic AI, autonomous commerce and programmable money is. It is the focus of my next Pulp Finction book Birth of a Unicorn being released in December. The thing is that there is…
Read More
