Shaping the future of finance
Starling Bank is the name of a new challenger bank being set up in London. The bank’s early days show how challenging the process of creating a new bank can be, as the Financial Times explains (see end of interview). Nevertheless, there is grand ambition to shake up the banking establishment, as outlined in this…
Metro Bank launched into mainstream UK retail banking in July 2010 and has been growing rapidly. As the first new retail bank for over a century, how is it fairing? In the second of The Finanser Interviews we talk to Craig Donaldson, CEO of Metro Bank, to find out. You’ve been on this roller coast ride with Metro…
I’ve recently been interviewing a series of innovators and challengers in the banking system, and will publish an interview here on a regular basis with these visionaries. In the first of The Finanser Interviews we talk to Mark Mullen, CEO and Co-Founder of Atom Bank and former CEO of First Direct. Atom Bank is a…
There’s one bank I regularly visit, which have their values emblazoned over their reception. These values are: Respect Integrity Service Excellence Stewardship … or RISES for short. It’s nice, but I always have this cynical little buddy on my shoulder, shouting in my ear: “do you think they mean it?” The problem with the things…
I was going to keep quiet during this holiday week but, in the spirit of selfishness, I’m going to post a few blog entries about the Ukraine. Ukraine is a country I’ve not visited before, but was invited to fly over just before Christmas to run a discussion with Privatbank, the largest retail and commercial…
Someone was attacking the premise of digital bank change the other day, by claiming it only refers to consumer banking. Nothing is changing in corporate or investment banking, they claimed. Wrong. All areas of financial processes, products and services are being attacked by some new start-up company somewhere. I realise this every day when I…
As mentioned earlier this week, whilst in Turkey I visited with BKM, the interbank clearing system for low value payments. Owned by the largest 10 banks in Turkey, BKM opened for business in 1990 and now processes half of the transactions in the country. The other half are run on a 'as on-us' basis on…
I recently chaired a dinner in Turkey. Turkey is one of the hotbeds for retail bank innovation, alongside Poland, in Europe (assuming you count Turkey as European). It was in Turkey that I first saw a strong and concerted push into contactless payments. Remember this ad for Garanti Bank: It was in Turkey that I…
I really enjoyed the presentations in Oslo, particularly the case studies by Nordea and ValYou. Nordea spoke about their experiences with social media usage. This, in itself, is fascinating as just a few years ago no bank spoke about social media in finance. Now, I am building case studies about how banks see this as…
