Digital Bank

I started a theme two years ago, in prep for the next new book, about how we can trust people digitally. In a deep fake world, we cannot. A good example is the Hong Kong staffer who transferred $25m to an account after talking with her deep fake CFO in a video call. The critical…

I really hate subscription services online. There are many that automatically renew without me knowing and, even worse, there are those that you sign up to without even knowing. A good example is one I discovered on my bank account the other day. Apparently I had signed up for a service that costs £3:00 a…

As usual, clicking over LinkedIn, I got a chart that made me sit back and smile a bit. What chart? This one: Source: Brice Groche, LinkedIn The chart outlines the revenue models of Europe’s digital finance firms, and what it made me realise is the big difference in strategies of challenger banks and start-ups. When…

I just stumbled across a rich vein of information from the Bank of England on Fintech! Interestingly, they state that their “work focuses on three cross-cutting technologies: artificial intelligence (AI), distributed ledger technology (DLT), and quantum computing”. Urmmm … what about crypto and CBDCs? Anyways, the bank makes clear that it is committed to support…

After talking about an intelligent bank yesterday, I found a huge challenge with a dumb bank today. It started because I just got a charge for a renewal of a subscription that I didn’t know I had. The charge was made from my AMEX card via PayPal, so I launched questions with both. PayPal was…

I keep thinking about what an Intelligent Bank means. What is an Intelligent Bank? Well, strip it back to basics. An Intelligent Bank is a bank that is so embedded and intimate with my digital finance that it can predict what I should do, could do and can do next. It knows when I’m being…

I’ve talked for some time about bot-to-bot payments in the Agentic AI world. The idea is that you won’t have to think as money thinks for you, and payments will transfer automatically without intervention. Moving this forward is a recent announcement from Google, which has developed the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open framework that enables agents…

It is rare that bank mergers work due to IT systems. Lloyds has historically taken the approach of not bothering to migrate them; TSB, after leaving the Lloyds family, migrated to a Sabadell system and it cost them millions; Santander believes all acquired banks work on their Parthenon core system, although that has now been replaced…

Building on yesterday’s blog about Project Nemo, it’s worth mentioning the Purple Pound. Every year, Britain celebrates Purple Tuesday – in case you missed it, it was last week – and it is all about recognising the massive community in all countries who are financially challenged. 78% of people who have disabilities find it difficult to…

My friend Rik Coeckelbergs wrote an interesting update about a speech by  Paul Maskall, Strategic Fraud Prevention and Behavioural Lead, UK Finance, at the Open Banking Expo. He specifically noted a question Paul asked the audience: “What’s the difference between fraud and marketing?” and thought that the only difference “lies in the endgame: whether the purpose…