Blog Index

A summary of the main blogs of the week … Frictionless Finance with FinTech Larry Summers, former director of the National Economic Council for President Barack Obama, writes a regular column in The Financial Times.  His latest piece is his take on FinTech, which has the main headline that FinTech is taking away frictions in finance. …

This week’s main blog headlines are … Why organisations resist innovation One of my good friends at 11FS referenced Conway’s Law the other day.  I wondered what it was, as I know Moore’s Law and the Law of Diminishing Returns in economics, but Conway’s Law?  What’s that? It’s a thesis created by Melvin E. Conway,…

A summary of the main blogs of the week … Arguing with a banker … A banker and I were talking about the function of a bank.  He gave me the classic view: “A bank is there to take people’s money and lend it out at a profit, whilst ensuring the risk of non-payment is…

This week’s main blog headlines are … Three rules for banking bots Writing more and more about chatbots, robots and AI, I can see a day coming in the not too distant future where we won’t be able to tell the difference between the human and the machine.  That’s not scary science fiction, as it’s…

A summary of the main blogs of the week … Solving state corruption with technology I try to generally avoid making political commentary on the blog as it’s not appropriate. This is a blog about technology and finance, not the economy and politics.  Every now and again the two come together such as with Brexit…

This week’s main blog headlines are …. GulfTech is the next big thing I’ve just returned from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) where there were a number of events.  Just a few weeks ago, I was in Bahrain, talking at a conference about FinTech as usual. What struck me is the interest and excitement about…

A summary of the main blogs of the week … Western Union: is the future bright or dark? I recently was hauled up over saying that Western Union (WU) was being disrupted by FinTech.  The words that a reader took issue with are: The high fees of Western Union and other remittance providers were fairly…

This week’s main blog headlines are …. Will Apple Bank be the first new American #Fintech Bank? On Wednesday the American Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC)* followed up on its promise last December to introduce a national bank charter for Fintech bank startups by issuing a white paper on how to apply…

A summary of the main blogs of the week … The Fast and the Furious I was having a conversation with a friend about the issues at Monzo this week (among others).  Their third-party payments processor had an outage at the weekend so the cards couldn’t be used. Then they had crashes on Android and…

This week’s main blog headlines are …. The FinTech Wave, Part One I wrote a blog the other day for The Next Web.  I thought it was ok, and it has gained a lot of traction socially. Apparently, people like it and here I’m going to expand upon the basic theme to give a detailed analysis…