Blog Index

I’m launching the new book Digital Human in New York on April 12 (if you want to come, register here), following on from our recent London launch. In London, I was delighted to host Ashok Vaswani, CEO of Barclays Bank UK, and Li Wang, Head of Alipay and Ant Financial for EMEA, as panellists to…

The main blog headlines are … What is the real difference between a challenger bank and an incumbent? I was reading about banks being average to poor at marketing, and wondered about it. Banks’ advertising generally is about either being cool or in love with you. Here are a few examples from British banks. Lloyds:…

The main blog headlines are … The lies spread by bankers about cryptocurrencies I had a chat with The Financial Times the other day, and provided lots of background as to why I don’t think cryptocurrencies are the choice of criminals. The comment that was reported was the following: Chris Skinner, a financial technology author, said…

The main blog headlines are … Are you really a digital bank? (just shake it off) I was in a conversation the other day where someone asked me how I can tell if a bank is really trying to be a digital bank or just a bank. Off-the-cuff I immediately said that I have a…

The main blog headlines are … Making a hash of it I’m having lots of discussions about tokenisation and cryptocurrencies, and it often boils down to hashing the data. Hashing data is taking the source information which may be your account details or card information and shortening it into a machine-readable link that doesn’t share…

The main blog headlines are … 9 out of 10 blockchain trials go nowhere I just read an interesting new report from Deloitte about blockchain. They tracked the history of 86,034 blockchain projects hosted on GitHub since 2009 to pull out “key lessons” on where the blockchain industry is going and its long-term prospects. Here…

The main blog headlines are … Excuse me, but would you like this chip in your vein or your brain? Lots of people talk a good talk about the internet of things and how my washing machine could now make purchases but my question is: what would my washing machine want to buy? More powder…

The main blog headlines are … Will platforms replace governments? I often talk about my week in Hangzhou last year, writing the case study on Ant Financial for the new book Digital Human, and particularly the words of Jack Ma on how he sees managing the Alibaba platform: Management. The word is there for regular…

This week’s main blog headlines are … Who has the most valuable bank brand? I just got The Banker magazine’s February issue discussing the top banking brands of the world. Timely, as I have been talking about trust and brands this week. In particular, I guess I was surprised the Chinese banks are the strongest…

The main blog headlines are … Tencent’s WeChat Pay is AliPay major rival I’ve written a lot about Ant Financial – they’re a 30,000 word case study in my new book – mainly because they are the first payments platform to focus upon global reach for financial inclusion. That is not to say that I…