Digital Bank

For centuries, we’ve designed the world for the able-bodied and called everyone else disabled. Today, technology is quietly rewriting those rules. It is making finance, communication, work and everyday life adapt to people, rather than forcing people to adapt to systems. Increasingly, I think disability tells us less about the individual than it does about…

For decades, we’ve treated poverty as an economic problem. Increasingly, I think it’s a technology problem. That sounds like a strange statement until you realise that the single biggest driver of financial inclusion over the past fifty years has not been governments, charities or banks. It has been technology. Governments, banks and charities have spent…

I was recently interviewed for a podcast about Agentic AI in payments and finance. Here’s how the interview went: You’ve been writing and speaking about agentic commerce for a while. When did it click for you that this wasn’t just another tech buzzword. What was the moment you thought, “this one is real”? The answer…

I blogged in February that Stripe might buy PayPal. That prediction is now coming true after a reported $53 billion bid by Stripe, backed by private equity firm Advent International, to acquire the OG, and this is far more than just another fintech acquisition. If it succeeds, it would probably be the most significant deal…

We’ve been told that artificial intelligence is going to make banking faster, cheaper, safer and smarter. Now the people who regulate the financial system are starting to ask a different question. What if AI becomes the biggest systemic risk since the global financial crisis? That isn’t coming from technology sceptics. It’s coming from the Bank…

Whilst most of the world is still debating whether AI should sit inside an app, Tencent – the Chinese Tech Titan – has quietly embedded an intelligent assistant inside one of the largest digital ecosystems on the planet. To appreciate why this matters, you first need to understand the scale of the platform. WeChat, known…

For years I thought cryptocurrency was a fascinating financial experiment. It challenged banks, questioned governments and forced regulators to think differently about money. What I hadn’t fully appreciated was that it wasn’t just disrupting finance. It was quietly becoming a force in politics and government, as I blogged the other day, and it’s now gone…

I noticed a post from Andreas Horn this week announcing that he was leaving IBM after eight years helping shape its AI strategy. It wasn’t a resignation post. It was a reflection on what he had learned, and his observations neatly capture where we are in the AI revolution. His biggest lesson was that almost…

Yesterday, there were a few headlines that caught my attention as they are all related. The first two were about stablecoins and whether you can trust them: Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority’s approach to joint regulation of systemic stablecoin issuers BIS report flags stablecoins’ flaws, dollarization risk For the past few years, the…

One of the more interesting articles I read over the weekend wasn’t about artificial intelligence, stablecoins or digital banks. It was about something far more uncomfortable: regret. Specifically, the financial regrets people reach in their sixties. At first glance, the list looks predictable: people wish they had saved more, invested earlier, worried less about spending on…