Case Studies

I was recently presenting in Brazil, and did a fair bit of research and networking about the FinTech scene there. The biggest story is Nubank, parent company Nu, the challenger bank that’s become one of the biggest and brightest in the world. Valued at close to $50 billion when they IPO’d in December 2021, the…

When I was a lad … OK, you can stop reading already if that’s going to be dealbreaker … when I was a lad, we had a holiday in Devon, a south-western county of England where my parents originated. There’s a lovely place there called Westward Ho! I have no idea why it has an…

I shared a post the other day: It inspired FinTech friend and colleague Efi Pylarinou to write a post about it. Efi has kindly allowed me to share the post with you here … Beware of powerful and ambitious Tigers amongst Big VCs We are in the 6th month of the Water Tiger Year and…

Back in the day, a number of books were key to my management thinking. Books by Peter Drucker, James Champy and Michael Hammer, Ricardo Semler, Michael Treacy, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, and more. All of these books were about changing businesses to be customer focused, and one of the…

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)…