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
It is Halloween week and, by coincidence, the same week as the Chancellor’s Budget which is announced tomorrow. I say by coincidence as it seems likely that the Chancellor wants to drink the banker’s blood by restoring higher taxes upon them. There has been a huge debate over increasing taxes on British banks. The contest…
Read More
I found myself wondering the other day why almost everything seems to end in .99. Books cost 9.99. Electrical goods are 99.99. Cars are advertised at 19,999. Even software subscriptions seem incapable of charging a clean 10 or 100. One penny appears to have become one of the most valuable numbers in commerce. Most people…
Read More
This 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 More
As Halloween approaches, I was reflecting on death and murder in banking. It is not a new thing for me, as it turns up quite often, but it hit me today with allegations that a former bank chairman arranged for his communications chief to be intimidated, in an operation that ended in his death. People…
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 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 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 More
Global trade is breaking apart. The winners won’t be the ones who move. They’ll be the ones who connect. 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
We have spent the last few years obsessing over artificial intelligence that sits in front of the customer – chatbots that summarise documents, copilots that draft emails, and interfaces that appear to know everything. But finance does not run on language. It runs on transactions, cash flows, liquidity, risk and trust. After spending time examining…
Read More
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 require Nubank to be the bank. That sounds like a subtle distinction,…
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 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 MoreGlobal trade is breaking apart. The winners won’t be the ones who move. They’ll be the ones who connect. 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
I spotted a fascinating post from Stephany Kirkpatrick on LinkedIn that gets straight to the heart of one of the biggest opportunities and failures facing wealth management today. Stephany is a successful founder and entrepreneur who founded Orum in 2019, sold it to Stripe in 2025 and has now started another venture called Pretty Smart…
Read MoreNubank 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 require Nubank to be the bank. That sounds like a subtle distinction,…
Read More
I just did an interview with LVTX about the future of payments. Sharing it here, fyi: What is one of the biggest structural inefficiencies in the payments and financial services ecosystem that still hasn’t been solved? One of the biggest structural inefficiencies in financial services today isn’t payments or settlement. It’s digital trust. The fact…
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 MoreThe 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
I’ve recently written quite a bit about the GENIUS Act, the GRANITE Act and the CLARITY Act in the United States. Well, yesterday was the crucial day as the CLARITY Act moved through the Senate or, rather, it didn’t. The USA has spent years arguing that cryptocurrency needs regulatory clarity and the Digital Asset Market…
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 MoreI’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 MoreGlobal trade is breaking apart. The winners won’t be the ones who move. They’ll be the ones who connect. 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
It’s SIBOS week and so lots of research and news announcements. Two caught my attention though, as I always look forward to what McKinsey and Cap Gemini are saying in their payments reports. The both tell the same story from different angles, namely that the payment is disappearing. Not disappearing in the sense that we…
Read More
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 research firms such as McKinsey and Gartner. The thing is that this conversation misses the bigger change. What’s that? It…
Read MoreI spotted a fascinating post from Stephany Kirkpatrick on LinkedIn that gets straight to the heart of one of the biggest opportunities and failures facing wealth management today. Stephany is a successful founder and entrepreneur who founded Orum in 2019, sold it to Stripe in 2025 and has now started another venture called Pretty Smart…
Read MoreThe 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 MoreThings we’re reading today include … Artificial intelligence in UK financial services – 2026 | Bank of England – the UK’s central bank Open a second bank account in case of cyber attack, FCA chief warns Ripple Wins U.S. Charter for a National Trust Bank Bank of England orders review of Revolut product approvals, FT…
Read MoreThings we’re reading today include … HMRC to take money directly from bank accounts of tax dodgers How a Democratic Congress could derail Trump’s bank deregulation agenda Politicians should ‘look at the UK economy as a CEO would’, says Lloyds Bank’s boss Banks lag behind investors on biodiversity Netanyahu rebuked for plan to use crypto…
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 MoreThings we’re reading today include … Barclays cutting 5,000 jobs as it increases reliance on AI AI Agents Are Logging Into Bank Accounts And Banks Can’t Tell AI oversight needs a different model to banking (op-ed by CEO of Goldman Sachs) China’s rich turn to U.S. banks as Beijing scrutinizes offshore wealth Healey’s bank heist…
Read MoreThings we’re reading today include … The single market exists on paper, but not yet in practice Europe’s financial regulators query Google over cloud outage that hit banks Can Nubank Really Crack the US Market? Fintechs top banks and stablecoins for cheap cross-border payment Payment fintech funding doubles in H1 as infrastructure leads Latvia Issues…
Read MoreThings we’re reading today include … Digital bank Revolut suffers worldwide outage: everything you need to know Google Cloud down: Revolut and other banking apps crash after system outage Major internet outage appears to have taken down Lloyds Bank and more Bank of England investigates Google outage Google says cloud outage affecting UK banks and…
Read MoreThings we’re reading today include … Central banks around the world are now reshuffling gold reserves for a new era of uncertainty Russians locked out of bank accounts as Ukraine hits Yandex data centers Italian bank chief linked to death of colleague who ‘fell out of window’ What Is Barclays Being Investigated Over By The…
Read MoreThings we’re reading today include … Banking tax raid fears hit London lenders’ shares ahead of budget UBS capital rules have Swiss stuck between a rock and a hard place Deutsche Bank targets Asia crypto custody expansion in 2027 as German launch nears Banking tax raid fears hit London lenders’ shares ahead of budget Payward…
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 MoreThis week’s main blog discussions include … The TrustWeb: Revisiting the Origins of Moneykind Ten years ago, I wrote a series of blogs called The Origins of Moneykind. They accompanied the launch of Digital Human and explored a simple question: where does money come from? Looking back a decade later, I’m surprised how little I…
Read More
