Case Studies

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…

Someone rightly pointed out that I talk a lot about Ant Group but not enough about other major initiatives like YONO, the mobile wallet of India. India is also a hotbed of innovation, with Google and Amazon fighting out the financial payments space alongside other players like PayTM and SBI, the State Bank of India….

This week I’m going to continue looking at mobile payments with a quick overview of where Square, Jack Dorsey’s card payments firm, is today. I’m sure you all saw this headline the other day but, just in case, Square is now worth more than Goldman Sachs. Square! Square. Squared. I used to blog about Square…

I first started blogging about smart mobile wallets in earnest in 2014. Back then, the mobile network operators were starting to get active and to try and bring the M-PESA and other experiences to the modern world. But no one wanted them. Six years later, mobile wallets are still pretty dire in most of Europe…

I was recently asked to interview Likhit Wagle, General Manager, Global Banking Industry, IBM, regarding their new IBM Cloud for Financial Services™ offering. The discussion was interesting so sharing it here for posterity.  Chris Skinner: Cloud is something we’ve been discussing for over a decade. Why has it taken so long for banks to…

After writing quite a lot challenging the challenger banks, one reached out to me asking for a slight correction of view. OakNorth. Now, this is a bank I like, as they’ve been doing so much under the radar, so I said that if they wanted to raise their head above the parapet, why not write…

As someone who’s followed Alibaba, Alipay and Ant Financial – now Ant Group, btw – for a long time, I cannot let their IPO appear without comment. If you haven’t spotted it, here’s coverage in The Wall Street Journal: Ant Group Co., the Chinese financial-technology giant controlled by billionaire Jack Ma, revealed how highly profitable…

Someone asked me about the other challenger and neobanks after yesterday’s blog. I guess we focus upon Monzo, Starling and Revolut, because they are the front-runners. But there’s also Aldermore, Atom, Tide, Tandem, Lintel, Metro, Monese, OakNorth, Zopa and more. Well, I don’t have enough time to write about all of them and I know…

A great headline posted in The Financial Times the other day:  When the banks closed in Wuhan, nobody cared The Financial Times article makes clear how advanced the Chinese economy is today. For several months this year, banks across Hubei province, an area home to 60 million people, shut their doors to retail customers. Most…