Digital Bank

Every banker understands the dangers of putting too many eggs in one basket. It’s one of the most basic principles of risk management. Diversify your exposures, spread your risks and never become too dependent upon a single counterparty. So why are we doing exactly the opposite with technology? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself…

Who do you trust? Your bank? Your boss? Your colleagues? Your friends? Your family? What if I told you that the next time you see any of them on a video call, it isn’t them? What if the person you are talking to looks exactly like someone you know, sounds exactly like them and even…

Revolut’s Nik Storonsky doesn’t want to run a bank When the founder of one of the world’s fastest-growing digital banks explains how he runs his business, you might expect a conversation about banking strategy, regulation, risk management and financial performance. Instead, you get a discussion about product development, artificial intelligence, customer behaviour and why traditional…

The future of banking is being fought over by artificial intelligence, human intelligence and, occasionally, a complete lack of either. Two headlines caught my eye yesterday, and they made me laugh. Not because they were particularly funny, but because they captured the glorious absurdity of where banking is heading. The first, from FinTech Global, asked…

I recently delivered a keynote at Visa Next in Poland exploring the future of money, payments and banking. From the technological revolutions that created today’s financial system to the arrival of AI-native banking, the industry faces a fundamental question: are we using technology to make banking better for customers, or just cheaper for banks? Here’s…

From Mt. Gox to Bybit and now Binance, cryptocurrency exchanges have lost billions to hackers. The technology works, so why do the institutions keep failing? If a bank lost $6.36 billion in minutes, there would be outrage, regulatory investigations, demands for resignations and questions about whether the institution should be allowed to continue operating. When…

For years, we have been told that digital makes everything better by making everything faster, cheaper and easier, and that the ultimate objective should be a world in which we can click here, tap there, buy now, pay later and complete the whole process without thinking about it. The great mantra of digital commerce has…

The Bank of England has released its latest report on artificial intelligence in financial services. The numbers are impressive. The reality is less so. Banks are embracing AI at extraordinary speed, but are they transforming banking or just making yesterday’s banking cheaper? The Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority have just published their latest…

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…