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Tech firms will be regulated like banks in future

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…

What is the worst thing a bank can do?

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…

Comparisons of platforms vs banks by the numbers

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…

The Big Digital Banks: JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs

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…

Digital banks are 35+ times more productive than traditional banks

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…

Why big banks fail

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…

PayTM and India Stack is turning the country cashless fast

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…

WeChat: the real Beast from the East

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…

Making a hash of it

I’m having lots of discussions about tokenisation and cryptocurrencies, and it often boils down to hashing the data. Hashing data is taking the source information which may be your account details or card information and shortening it into a machine-readable link that doesn’t share the original data. It’s a little like when I tweet a…

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Chris Skinner
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