Case Studies

There are two big tech topics in banking these days, namely Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain. These two tech titans are changing the back office of banks into intelligent shared structures that will be mind-blowing a decade from now. In fact, they’re not far off that today. I’ve written a lot about Blockchain, and feel…

We hosted ePassi at our recent launch of Nordic Finance Innovate (NFI) in Helsinki, Finland. ePassi are the partner firm of Alipay, bringing the app to Finland to allow Chinese tourists to pay easily when travelling via Finland to Europe. It’s been very successful as it was initially launched to allow tourists to come and…

I finally finished writing my new book. I’m not going to say too much about it, as it now has to go through a lengthy editing cycle and will be released next year. A key theme in the new book is financial inclusion and, to those ends, I made a visit to Hangzhou, China, to meet…

I mentioned the Lego Bank not built by Lego recently. It’s all about the Open Marketplace of apps, APIs and analytics, and I said that the idea was illustrated well by firms like Solaris, Clear.bank and Bud. Just to follow on from that, here is a series of video interviews we recorded during the meetings about…

I’m making a presentation on cybersecurity this week at our Nordic Finance Innovation meetings. This meant preparing a few new slides from scratch as I don’t have a set deck for cybercrime, and sat and started ideas just as the news dropped about the Equifax breach. You’ll all know about this by now, but over…

I now think I am a good friend of Pablo García Arabéhéty, CGAP’s Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean. This is, in part, because he’s contributed one of the key pieces I’m using in my new book Digital Human (due for release next Spring), and partly because we met at the CIAB conference last week,…

I’ve been spending a lot of time travelling around the LatAm markets over the past few years. In fact, I was just at the CIAB FELBAN FIBA conference in Miami that covers this geography and this year saw many firms from Nicaragua to Honduras to Costa Rica attend. But the major markets are the competition between…

I just had a whirlwind visit to Indonesia to support DBS in the rollout of their digibank service there. It was a very short visit, but a packed evening of presentations and discussions. Part of the time was spent with Piyush Gupta, the CEO, who I’ve been watching for some time now. Piyush has surrounded…

I get press releases all the time and generally ignore them. In fact, I don’t know why they email me, as I never post them on the blog. Uh-oh. I just got one that I’m posting on the blog. Floodgates opening.   What will happen when Amazon opens a bank. It is not such a…

I was surprised to make a chance discovery about The Wizard of Oz.  The film with Judy Garland is firmly embedded in modern culture as a classic, but did you know that it was a rally call against the financial system when the book was originally written? It as a political, economic and monetary allegory…