The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the guys who are responsible for Basel regulations and act as the global central bank to all the central banks, caught global headlines yesterday by saying that bitcoin will break the internet. Wowser. I couldn’t ignore this and neither should you so here’s a summary of what they said…
Every now and then, someone writes something better than me and, if they’re very nice, they let me republish their content on this blog. Ben Robinson of Temenos is one of those guys. Two years ago, he wrote a great insight into banking business models and, last week, he did it again in a superb write-up…
So, I’m presenting at a Corporate Treasury event, and we get into talking about distributed ledger technology (DLT) and blockchain. Comments are made around so many tests and proofs of work and concept, but so little production. At this point, someone made the comment that it will happen from the ground up, as corporates start…
Building on Friday’s blog about small bank thinking, there’s another anomaly that occurs with big banks which is their usual response to technology is to test it. The problem with testing technology is that it is just a test. A false implementation. It is not designed for reality and can lead to false results. For…
I’ve been tempted for some time to write a book about how sex is at the heart of commerce, innovation and money. I’ve alluded to it a few times, and particularly noted that the right honourable Jeremy Clarkson sometimes says something intelligent. “Money and rumpy-pumpy (sex) are the twin engines powering everything we do”. He’s…
I’ve been watching the rollercoaster ride of cryptocurrencies very carefully for the last year, and it only struck me today that these are not currencies … yet. Apart from a few novelty vendors and merchants who put bitcoin on their websites, I don’t see many others accepting ether or XRP, and when I have tried…
Over the weekend, I received a couple of interesting emails about things happening in Asia. The first is a translation of an announcement from the People’s Daily, the most official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, discussing digital currencies. The article is fairly high level and makes no commitment to regulate, deregulate or commit to…
I’ve been flying around a bit and was lucky enough to find myself onstage the other day, chairing the Ant Financial Technology Forum at Money20/20 Singapore. I was honoured to accept to be the moderator of the afternoon and guess I was chosen because Alipay and Ant Financial are a 30,000 word in-depth case study…
I know that we deal with quite complicated things in financial technologies. AI, AGI, ASI (Artificial Intelligence, Artificial General Intelligence, Artificial Super Intelligence); machine learning and deep learning; blockchain, shared ledgers and distributed ledger technologies; cryptocurrencies, virtual currencies and digital currencies; Open Banking and Open APIs; and so on and so forth. In fact, the…
I had a chat with The Financial Times the other day, and provided lots of background as to why I don’t think cryptocurrencies are the choice of criminals. The comment that was reported was the following: Chris Skinner, a financial technology author, said it was “complete rubbish” to suggest the main use of cryptocurrencies was criminal….
