Digital Bank

I would love to walk into a bank’s boardroom with my opening slide explaining: “Step confidently into the future of Web3 with Zond, a quantum-resistant Layer-1 blockchain* engineered to transcend today’s security limitations and safeguard your dApps, from DeFi protocols to NFT marketplaces, while powering the next generation of smart contracts in tomorrow’s digital economy.”…

Everything I read talks about simplified customer experience in payments and yet, when I look at it, the process of payments is becoming far more complicated. You made a payment in the old world with a bank note or cheque, and it was a simple transaction over the counter. Cash involved two parties: the customer…

I’m discussing a lot about digital currencies these days, and the future of CBDCs, Stablecoins and Crypto. The conversation generally goes along the lines of central banks issuing digital currencies is really unnecessary. No one wants them and no one trusts them. The whole thing is just a scam for governments to track and trace…

Discover how fintech is transforming small business, from mobile payments and AI tools to why the next unicorn might be run from home. I’ve run a small, independent business for almost 25 years. It’s been fun and most of it has been rewarding, except for the accounting, banking and paperwork. No one enjoys that behind-the-scenes…

I’ve recently blogged about bank IT outages … Bank IT outages … let’s talk about the bank systems Jenga … and it is getting more and more common. For example, in the UK, Barclays suffered 33 system failures between January 2023 and February 2025, according to data from the House of Commons Treasury select committee….

After recently attending conferences in Zurich and Paris, with most of the audience coming from the banking community, this week is Money2020 in Amsterdam and the discussions are very different. What’s the difference? Well, bankers debate regulations and fintechs discuss innovations. It constantly strikes me that, during the 2000s, I spent most of my time…

Following the Swiss meeting, I was then honoured to moderate an opening panel at EBAday with representatives of JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank. We had a wide ranging discussion but, similar to the details of CRD VI, a lot of regulations came up as top-of-mind. MCiA, EUID, CRDVI, PSD3, EUAI etc and it did intrigue me…

Some years ago an elderly gentleman entered the lobby of one of Britain’s biggest banks demanding to talk to someone about the £5 million he had been given by David Cameron. A senior manager at the bank took the gentleman to a consultation room, and it turned out that the man had been notified of…

I just ran across an item from 1994 written by Carmen Hermosillo talking about cyberspace, the internet and the future. It is quite something but TL:DR, so here are a few highlights: Introducing Humdog: Pandora’s Vox Redux (1994) “When I went into cyberspace I went into it thinking that it was a place like any…

There’s a very interesting analysis of the cyber attacks on Marks & Spencer, the Co-op and Harrods on the BBC this week. If you have access to their iPlayer, then it’s well worth a watch: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002d2lh/inside-the-high-street-cyberattacks If you don’t, then here’s the summary as it illustrates our fragile digital world today. In April, Marks &…