Blog Index

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…

The blog’s main discussions this week included: COP26: what’s going on? The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) takes place in Glasgow from 31 October – 12 November 2021. Triodos Bank have selected five key events they feel worth attending so, here they are: ‘Finance Day’ – Wednesday 3 November For the first time the COP has…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Do you see the point of “Squid Game”? Like most people, I’ve watched and enjoyed Squid Game on Netflix (the original language version with subtitles, avoid the dubbed version), but did you get the point? I’ll avoid giving away too much, in case you still haven’t watched it,…

This week’s blog discussions include … Is George Orwell’s vision coming true? 1948, 1984, 2030 We talk a lot about FinTech. Some of us then break it down and talk about InsurTech, WealthTech, TradeTech and more. But do we ever zoom out? What about just tech? What about just a digital world? It’s funny as…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Is there a good way to shut a customer down? My mate Dave Birch wrote a Forbes piece the other day titled Unbank the Banked. I thought it was going to be a story about how banks are ejecting thousands of customers due to poor onboarding. Instead Dave…

This week’s main blog discussions included … The day the old bank died For many years I’ve enjoyed talking about the origins of banking with the Medici’s in the Renaissance era. Amazingly, one bank has survived since then and I use them to talk about the oldest bank in the world. Do you know which…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Branches, cash and cards? Get out of here! I’ve been presenting and writing about the end of branches, cash and cards for twenty years: 2007: Bank strategies are fundamentally flawed – design around IP, not branches To be clear, I’m not saying they’re dead. I’ve been saying their…

This week’s main blog discussions include … The fine line between banker and jail Some years ago, I regularly talked about bankers being criminals. It’s not a popular theme with the banking community but, a bit like a genius, bankers walk that line between good and bad. Genius’s walk the line between amazing and mad….

This week’s main blog discussions include … What if you had “f**k you money”? I was quite taken by South Park’s co-creator Matt Stone talking to Bloomberg, about a deal where he and his co-founder Trey Parker just got paid $900 million to make six more seasons and 14 movies. His specific comment: “As you can…

The main discussions on the blog this week include … Fires to the left of me, floods to the right and here I am, stuck in the monsoon with you I heard a statistic on the BBC that natural disasters due to weather are costing the insurance industry seven times more today than in the…