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Privacy versus Permission

I’ve been wondering a lot lately about the balance between privacy and permission in banking. The fact is that we don’t want people having our account details and yet, on certain occasions, it is necessary. So, what to do? In today’s rapidly evolving financial landscape, the dichotomy between privacy and permission access has emerged as…

Is the erosion of trust terminal?

Trust in the news services has dropped from 51% to 35% over the last decade, according to Oxford University’s Reuters Institute Digital News Report. The headline paragraph can be summarised as it’s 2025 and we live in a time of deep political and economic uncertainty, changing geo-political alliances, climate breakdown and many destructive conflicts around the…

All in all, we’re just another brick in the wall

For most of the last decades, I’ve been having arguments about control versus freedom; government versus the individual; the state versus the libertarian. It began in earnest with the launch of bitcoin, where my position is always that you cannot have money without government. Then, as most of you will know, the question is: which…

Jamie Dimon on AI, regulators, leadership and stuff

You may not have spotted it but Jamie Dimon, the CEO and Chair of JPMorgan, who was dressed down in t-shirt and jeans, made a recent appearance at a tech summit on AI organised by Databricks. The 40-minute interview is over here on YouTube, and took the form of a fireside chat with Ali Ghodsi,…

Are you fit to lead your bank if you don’t understand tech?

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.”…

Is fintech complicating the process of payments?

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…

CBDCs, Stablecoins and Crypto: which will win?

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…

How small businesses are driving innovation in finance

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…

The risk of change versus the risk of not changing

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….

Looking for regulation and innovation in the same room

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…

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