At the start of 2015, I was honoured to be invited to join a new group called the Whitechapel Think Tank. The group was initiated by Jeremy Wilson, Vice Chairman of Barclays Corporate Banking and John Edge, Managing Partner, RRVIG. The first meeting called together UK Government, Treasury and the Bank of England, Barclays thought…
I had a really interesting conversation with Chris Barker, Head of Digital and Engineering for Royal Bank of Scotland. As usual, the conversation moved around data analytics, deep learning, artificial intelligence, building enterprise data systems, separating content from processing, re-platforming the back-end infrastructure and core systems and more. I’ll write more about that stuff tomorrow,…
I don’t know about you, but I’m completely confused about blockchains, sidechains and such like. I admit it. It’s beyond me and, if it’s beyond me, gawd knows how normal folk will make it out. The reason it’s so confusing is that we’ve recently seen the rise of blockchain companies like R3, Ripple, Erethreum, Eris…
I’ve been asked the same question twice this week in two separate conferences (one in Vienna, the other in San Francisco): “how will we deal with the corruptive forces when we are all on the net?” The second questioner clarified what she meant by referencing the film Enemy of the State, where Will Smith gets…
I attended a great meeting in Austria with Google yesterday. There were a number of Google Vision presentations and discussions, along with nice vignettes from Accenture and Raiffeisen Bank. One slide particularly caught my attention however, as I’ve just started to see a cycle in Fintech and this slide from Google’s Creative Evangelist (really?) Jeremy…
Welcome to bankcoin Much to the dismay of the liberati, bitcoin is flatlining. After dipping down to the $250 per bitcoin price earlier this year, it’s stayed there ever since. Noteworthy is the all the marketing spin of announcements of We take bitcoin payments, has died down and the use of bitcoin is not moving. …
I have seen several banks note, and particularly two in the past week, that shows the shift of thinking as we move to the hybrid world of technology and finance. Most talk about Fintech start-ups but these two show a different perspective. First, Derek White of Barclays talks a lot with Business Insider about blockchain and…
I was recently interviewed by Emerging Markets Review just before travelling to Korea in July. The interview lasted a while, but stunned me when they produced the magazine with yours truly front page and centre. Rather than saying anything more, here's the interview which you can download as a PDF if you prefer. The global…
Having noted that most bankers are now saying bitcoin bad, blockchain good, here’s a nice set of quotes I’ve been gathering of what banks are actually saying: “At its core, Bitcoin is a decentralized protocol that enables exchange of value among parties around the world, giving it the potential to alter the financial services landscape,” Jay…
