Blog Index

This week’s main blog discussions include: How a bank’s IT systems allowed £100m a day of fraud NatWest, formerly Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), is a good example of a bank with rubbish IT. This was illustrated when I spotted the headline: NatWest fined $300 million for money laundering. They didn’t do the money laundering,…

The last fortnight’s main discussions include: Welcome to 2022 I used to make predictions to start the year. I’m not doing that anymore, as everyone else is doing them. I will add a few thoughts at the end of this week’s series of blog entries but, for the moment, here’s my selection of what’s ……

As per normal, I look at the top blogs picked up by readers during the year. This year, maybe it’s me or maybe it’s them, the theme seems to be all about crypto … oh, and my April Fool’s joke.   #11 What will happen to bitcoin and crypto this year?   #10 If you…

This week’s blog discussions included … The importance of financial literacy “When I was a lad, I got four shillings and sixpence every week for pocket money.” “Luxury! I was whipped in two by my dad and lived in a shoebox by the motorway!” says my friend. OK, enough revival of old Monty Python sketches,…

This week’s blog discussions included … What will happen with crypto next? I had a friend who bought a load of bitcoin for around $10 each and then sold them to buy a house. If he had kept them, he could have ten houses today. I have another friend who invested heavily in ETH, the…

This week’s main blog discussions included … Twas the Night before Cryptmas As it is almost Christmas, I felt it necessary to rewrite the classic poem Twas the Night before Christmas. My version is Twas the Night before Cryptmas. Twas the Night before Cryptmas Twas the night before Cryptmas, when all through the net Not…

This week’s main blog discussions include … The end of the line I saw the news that landlines are due to be dead by 2025 in the UK. Shame? Nah, who uses a landline these days? Twenty years ago, we depended on dial-up lines for AOL. Today, with WiFi and mobile everywhere, we’ve moved on….

This week’s main blog discussions include … FinTech? A flash in the pan? No, it’s worth a third of all banking I met with some friends the other day, who showed some stats that demonstrate that all FinTech is worth a third of all of the banking market worldwide. Source: CFTE’s Fintech Job Report [sum of largest…

This week’s main blog discussions include: $2 trillion a year sits rotting in bank accounts This headline caught my attention the other day: Bank loyalty costs savers £1.6 billion a year in missed interest The detail: There’s £246.5 billion ($340 billion) languishing in accounts paying no interest at all … A survey of 2,000 adults…

This week was COP26 and so the Finanser had a two-track week. The usual updates, but also the COP updates. Here’s the usual track … Why challenger banks find it hard to challenge I was thinking about this article in The Telegraph saying what a rotten job supermarkets have made of competing with banks. Tesco…