People were surprised to see a headline that garnered much market shock: Markets Crash after reports that Binances Shangai Office Closed in Crypto Crackdown Argh. Crypto meltdown! I was amused to see a headline that garnered much online mirth: Markets Crash after reports that Binances Shangai Office Closed in Crypto Crackdown Because Binance doesn’t have…
Really interesting interview here with Ana Botin, Executive Chair of Santander, on Bloomberg. It starts with talking about how Santander can make a difference on climate change with Ana claiming that the bank is voted the most sustainable bank in the world. But when the interviewer, Erik Schatzker, asks her how Santander is making a…
I’ve blogged for a while now about the different approaches to Big Tech in China and America. In China, Big Tech is pretty much working hand-in-hand with government to solve society’s issues and police them. People in the West may not like it or understand it, but Big Brotherly Love works in China for the…
It’s been interesting to watch the development of Facebook’s Libra project. As I expected, regulators hate it and are asking lots of questions about it. Most seem to want to ban it. And now PayPal has dropped out of the original founding team, with Visa and MasterCard rumoured to follow. What’s also been interesting is…
Being conference season, there were many announcements in the past week about headlines companies wanted to gain with their innovations. One of the main headline grabbers for me came from R3. These included: Mastercard partners R3 … R3 and Infosys complete blockchain trade finance trial Wells Fargo’s Stablecoin ‘Faster, Cheaper’ Than SWIFT … Bank of America Joins…
Almost every day, there is an announcement of a new payments innovation. From the success of the likes of Klarna, Stripe and Square in retail payments to the growth of new payment mechanisms like Ripple and JPMorgan’s internal settlement engine, the JPM Coin and the launch of digital currencies from bitcoin to Libra from Facebook,…
After yesterday’s article about how backward America is, in terms of payments, there’s a useful article talking about how they’re trying to rectify this. Bearing in mind that the big American banks are all spending $10 billion plus each on technology, they should be updating, and CB Insights latest installment looks at where the top American…
I often say that blockchain is one of the most complex areas, combining all we don’t know about technology with all we don’t understand about finance. It’s a big hole of acronyms, confusion and debate. Some things that claim to be blockchain don’t use blockchains, and some blockchains claim not to be blockchains but blockchain…
Who wants transparency when you can have magic? Do you watch The Crown? If not, maybe you should as Series 3 is about to begin with Olivia Coleman, a great actress. The first two series weren’t bad either, with Netflix spending $130 million on the season (around $10 million per episode some estimates) making it…
A lot of discussion at the United Nations, where I’ve been all week (blogging about that next week), has raised the question of Libra, the Facebook digital currency. I’m avoiding calling it a cryptocurrency, as it’s more a stablecoin that is focused upon transactions, which is why it has Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Stripe as…
