Case Studies

Some of you may know that I write a monthly column for The Banker magazine, and have been doing this for almost twenty years! But The Banker goes back way longer than my column. In fact, it began in January 1926 when the first issue was published and is now almost a century old. Interestingly, since 1970 they’ve been…

Another useful person in my online network is Steve McLaughlin of @FTPartners, who I spotted sent a tweet last week saying they had produced a challenger bank report. FT Partners’ in-depth report, “The Rise of Challenger Banks” now features an exclusive interview with Brandon Krieg, Co-Founder and CEO of @Stash – view the full report…

Varun Mittal, Associate Partner with EY, recently posted a couple of interesting slides about the launch of virtual banking licences to encourage challenger banks in Asia. If you’re not aware, there’s a great deal of digital banking activity across Asia. It’s not just in China, but there are notable things happening in Hong Kong, Malaysia,…

When The Financial Times does what they’re good at – covering financial markets and not technology – then they do produce some fascinating content. Case in point is the latest coverage of JPMorgan Chase’s (JPMC) 2019 results. The bank’s latest results are stunning, with the fourth-quarter profit soaring to $8.52 billion or $2.57 a share….

I have often written about how the developing world is leap-frogging the developed world. The reason is that the developing world had no infrastructure in place whilst the developed world implemented their infrastructure in the last century. The developed world has become a legacy world. The developing world is a world fit for today. First…

I picked up a few innovative changes taking place this week within banks. In fact, I should point out that banks are not static beasts, as many claim. They are changing all the time, doing things all the time, adapting all the time. The question is: are they adapting in the right way? Charles Darwin…

Banks are control freaks. I’ve blogged about that often. I’ve also blogged often about how they need to move to be open and partnering. That’s not easy. It’s obviously easier to launch a brand new bank, fresh with no legacy and open to everything, isn’t it? Not necessarily so. The issue with launching a new…

I’ve been noticing that there are more and more issues arising with the big internet giants. Unlike in China, where the companies are working with governments, the big Western giants work outside government control. That creates issues, particularly in Europe where government does not like to be out of control. Hence the reason why American…

I’ve heard many ex-bankers who joined a FinTech start-up, challenger bank or similar, say that they’ve achieved more in the past year than in the past decade. They claim to have achieved more with £1 million than they would have achieved before with £100 million in a bank. They’ve developed more with a team of…