Case Studies

The CEO of MasterCard, Michael Miebach, stated at a conference the other day that SWIFT might no longer exist in next five years. Miebach was part of a panel on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) at the World Economic Forum (WEF) but, as Shashank Bhardwaj writes on Forbes, once the panel was over a Mastercard…

JPMorgan had their investors briefing on Monday. It was interesting, with lots of content (you can download all of the presentations here). I took a look at their briefing, and it is pretty mind-blowing tbh. A bank with 60 million active digital customers, processing USD$10 trillion a day with 40 billion security events a day….

I haven’t written much about Facebook’s digital currency Diem, as there’s not much to write about. A dead duck from day one, it would never succeed. I said so back when it launched in 2019: The bottom-line is that Facebook may have developed a stablecoin using blockchain to enable global payments within Messenger, Instagram and…

I had a fascinating conversation the other day, and shouldn’t share it here but hey, it’s my blog. I was talking about my understanding of SWIFT and how Yawar Shah, Chair of the Association, is killing it. I must admit, it had not occurred to me re the politics of SWIFT, until that discussion, as…

Four years ago, I was using this slide in my presentations. As I blogged at the time: “Those who recognise that banks are doing 1000 things average, will naturally come together to do 1000 things brilliantly.” The idea was that FinTech start-ups would start to align with each other to create global platforms. The first…

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 bank that is?         Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS)…

I have a few friends who are climate deniers. That’s fine, they are entitled to their views, but I cannot accept that view. There’s too much science that shows the world is changing. Their argument – those who believe this is not a climate emergency – is that it’s just Earth going through its’ regular…

After blogging about involvement in USA/China dynamics yesterday, I thought it pertinent to share a timeline of activities today that place context around the whole case. I could add more, but don’t want to bore you …   2007.2: Huaying (Huawei) bought Skycom. Ms. Meng was the Corporate Secretary of Huaying.   2007.11: Huaying sold Skycom…

I’ve been amazed at the rise of superapps in China. Alibaba and WeChat allow you to socialise, ship and buy anywhere, anytime. It came home to me when I was shopping in a Chinese store and my Chinese friend said: let me just check the price of this on Taobao. She found it was a…

I spotted two updates recently. The first is the half a billion dollar mistake at Citigroup. The second is how Amazon created Amazon Web Services (AWS). The two pieces go hand-in-hand. First, how could Citigroup make a billion dollar mistake? User Interface. The mistake was made by a worker in their offshore service centre, who…