Blog Index

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…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Banks exist because trust doesn’t scale Some days, the financial news seems to have nothing whatsoever in common but yesterday there were four stories where I saw a link. The first is a US senator demanding answers from Barclays over Jes Staley’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Then there…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Pulp Finction arrives … and the reviews are in One of the things I have always struggled with is that most books about finance are either informative or entertaining. Very few manage to be both. That was the motivation behind writing Diary of a Ponzi Scheme. Rather than…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Crypto and Politico: One Step Beyond For years I thought cryptocurrency was a fascinating financial experiment. It challenged banks, questioned governments and forced regulators to think differently about money. What I hadn’t fully appreciated was that it wasn’t just disrupting finance. It was quietly becoming a force in…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Who are the top fintech firms of 2026? I was thinking about the companies I reference often as hot fintech start-ups and then realised that they are no longer start-ups. They are companies building the infrastructure, intelligence and operating systems that banks, businesses and consumers increasingly depend upon….

This week’s main blog discussions include … How technology has integrated politics and power There are moments when an unexpected event reveals more about the world than years of official speeches and carefully crafted reports. The recent leak of Peter Thiel’s invitation-only network, Dialog, feels like one of those moments. This is not because it…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Why are people scared of AI? Almost every innovation is met by people who believe it will destroy our ability to earn a living. The Luddites feared mechanisation. Clerks feared computers. Bank managers feared the internet. Taxi drivers feared ride-sharing apps. Retailers feared ecommerce. And now everyone fears…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Diary of a Ponzi Scheme and it’s all about tokenisation I’ve just launched another new book! After the successful launch of Intelligent Bank with Huawei a few weeks ago I had, in the meantime, developed another book: Diary of a Ponzi Scheme. The scheme is all about Clint who creates a “Token…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Monzo, Revolut and Starling: the quiet emergence of Britain’s Banking Champions For years, the conversation around digital banks focused on whether they could survive. Today, the question is very different: what are they becoming? The latest results from Monzo, Revolut and Starling reveal something remarkable. These institutions are…

This week’s main blog discussions include … “Intelligent Bank” is officially launched I spent last week in China with Huawei. It was fantastic and, finally, it gave me the chance to announce and release my new book Intelligent Bank. Regular blog readers will know that I’ve been talking about this as the third fintech revolution but I…