Digital Bank

We gave them our data, our money, our businesses and now our intelligence. In return, they gave us convenience. Nobody asked who would end up controlling the world. I have been thinking a lot about the Google Cloud outage this week and the fact that a power failure in a London data centre disrupted banking…

When Google Goes Down, Your Bank Goes Down. Who Is Really in Control? We spent decades worrying about banks being too big to fail. Now we have a handful of technology companies that are too important to fail, and yesterday demonstrated why that should terrify us. I’ve recently been blogging and writing about the dangers…

You have to laugh. The police spend their lives chasing criminals and now the criminals are stealing their identities to sell cryptocurrency. You really couldn’t make it up. The latest example comes from Ireland, where the Gardaí, the Irish police, have apparently discovered that their social media accounts are rather less secure than the criminals…

There is something wonderfully hypocritical happening in banking this week. American banks have started blocking AI bots from access to customer accounts: ‘You don’t want rogue agents’: Jamie Dimon bars outside AI agents like Meta’s Muse from JPMorgan accounts Citi becomes latest US bank to restrict AI agents from accessing accounts JPMorgan Chase, Citi and…

I was at a presentation last week where a guy from Canada shared the Wealthsimple story. I was not familiar enough with it, although I had heard of them, but the guy showed their advert and it cracked me up. #mustwatch For decades, Canadian banking has been dominated by a handful of powerful institutions with…

Global trade is breaking apart. The winners won’t be the ones who move. They’ll be the ones who connect. For years, the global trade conversation has been dominated by one question: where should we move our supply chains? China is risky, America is unpredictable, Europe is expensive and geopolitical tensions are making international commerce look…

I spotted a fascinating post from Stephany Kirkpatrick on LinkedIn that gets straight to the heart of one of the biggest opportunities and failures facing wealth management today. Stephany is a successful founder and entrepreneur who founded Orum in 2019, sold it to Stripe in 2025 and has now started another venture called Pretty Smart…

Nubank wants to go global but not like Revolut. Everyone assumes Nubank wants to be like the next Revolut. They’re wrong. Revolut wants to build one financial superapp for the world. Nubank is building something different: a global banking empire that does not require Nubank to be the bank. That sounds like a subtle distinction,…

I just did an interview with LVTX about the future of payments. Sharing it here, fyi: What is one of the biggest structural inefficiencies in the payments and financial services ecosystem that still hasn’t been solved? One of the biggest structural inefficiencies in financial services today isn’t payments or settlement. It’s digital trust. The fact…

You are reading this as your data is harvested. On average, your personal data is collected 271 times a day. I know who you are. I know what you are doing. I will look for you. I will find you. Most of us think surveillance involves CCTV cameras, governments, police databases and, perhaps, the slightly…