Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

Digital Bank

The Top 10 Blogs of 2025

Every year I visit the analytics engine to see which blogs got the most visits. This list is this year’s although, interestingly, the blog entry with the most clicks generally is the one I wrote about who invented WiFi. Regardless, the list this year is interesting as it is mainly about fintech firms like Klarna,…

Digital Identity versus Privacy

Building on my post earlier regarding the arguments for and against digital identity, there is another argument around what they mean for privacy. Luckily, a friend of mine decided to send me a post they thought useful around those themes and I liked what they wrote so, here it is: How People Are Prioritizing Digital…

The arguments for and against digital identification

For many years, I’ve been among the fintech influencers arguing for a digital identity system. Most people reply that they don’t want one. Even an anonymous encrypted one. They fear that governments will find ways to track and trace them, and so it does not work. Their fears are slightly irrational as, if you use…

A great example of a terrible UX (#Barclays)

Every three months my accountant asks me to send them my bank statements to do the company’s VAT returns. It’s annoying but hey, no one can access my bank account except me. But then something happened recently. The company’s bank accounts are with Barclays, and they changed the interface or did something so that, when…

How Agentic AI is reshaping mortgage fulfilment end-to-end

I was having an interesting debate the other day about how AI will impact banking longer-term. The most interesting angle was that AI will provide knowledge and blockchain (or distributed ledgers, if you prefer) will provide provenance, and that the two combined are a killer partnership. Thinking about it, this gets interesting. So AI can…

We will always need intermediaries … just what kind?

I spotted a quote this week: “All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.” — Arthur Schopenhauer My mind immediately moved to bitcoin and cryptocurrency and, specifically, Jamie Dimon. For years, Dimon has said that bitcoin is a scam and yet, now,…

What to do if your bank tells you to f*ck off?

Jamie Dimon, the chap that runs JPMorgan, has just stirred up a big debate about debanking by accusing Trump Media, the folks that run Donald’s Truth Social platform, of ‘making up things’. What things are they making up? That they’ve been debanked by JPMorgan for their political affiliation. The thing is that Jamie then poked…

Spacecoin: a currency for astronauts?

I just got an invite to invest in Spacecoin. What is that? SPACECOIN is a visionary cryptocurrency built for the space economy and designed to offer a decentralized, efficient, and secure platform for interplanetary trade investors and exploration. WTH? My initial reaction was the idea that this is launching a cryptocurrency for those who want…

I love my robot, but does my robot love me?

Are we giving up on dating and instead putting all of our demands onto digital people who are programmed to behave and speak exactly how we want? A new survey of 2,000 British men and women between the ages of 18 and 45 produced by Equimundo, a US-based non-profit organisation, found that men have simply…