Case Studies

A month ago, I blogged about the problems at TSB when implementing the change-over of their core systems. Yes, core systems replacements are challenging, but they’re not risky when done right. Unfortunately, TSB’s change-over shows all the marks of how to get it wrong. Not only has it been highly public, with the CEO Paul…

I just listened to a presentation by Nick Thompson, editor-in-chief at Wired, about all things in the future of tech. A lot of it was focused upon Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning towards the end, but the first half was interesting as it focused upon why there is a backlash against Silicon Valley right now. He put…

Banks are trusted guardians of our money. As long as our money is safe, then we trust them. It’s when our money is breached or lost that banks misbehave, which is why the 2008 financial crisis was so concerning. The run on Northern Rock and Bear Stearns were terrible moments but, in either case, neither…

I’m not a financial analyst but a technologist and so, unsurprisingly, I got called out by some pedantic accountants over my simplistic assertion that Ant Financial is 35x more productive than banks like Barclays, as I was simply using their revenues per employee to make comparisons.  Similarly, in previous discussions of platforms versus banks, using…

I was having a chat about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in banking the other day. It was an interesting conversation, although most of the examples were for customer service via Chatbots, which doesn’t impress me much. I know that systems like Erica, short for Bank of AmErica, are up and running to make life easier, but…

I’m launching the new book Digital Human in New York on April 12 (if you want to come, register here), following on from our recent London launch. In London, I was delighted to host Ashok Vaswani, CEO of Barclays Bank UK, and Li Wang, Head of Alipay and Ant Financial for EMEA, as panellists to…

A good example of that big bank thinking I referred to yesterday is Santander, and an incident that I fumed about the other day. I usually make payments to EU companies via my business account, which pays no fees on EU payments as per PSD2 and SEPA principles. However, I paid a Polish company £86…

I was reading about banks being average to poor at marketing, and wondered about it. Banks’ advertising generally is about either being cool or in love with you. Here are a few examples from British banks. Lloyds: we’re old but still here with a big horse Nationwide: we have no pretensions because we are a…

I’ve just spent a few days in India and the inevitable discussions around Aadhaar, UPI, demonetization and more came around. Y’all may know some of this as I’ve blogged about it before but the bit that I wanted to focus upon was the demonetization position. In November 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took what many…

I’ve written a lot about Alibaba, Ant Financial and Alipay. This is not because I endorse or want to advertise the company, but because they are the first company to have embarked on a global financial inclusion strategy and have been marking it happen. Ant Financial is now some of the technology power behind PayTM…