Digital Bank

I was recently interviewed by the International Finance Magazine about Revolut getting their UK banking licence and what this means to banks in general. Here’s the discussion: With Revolut securing a UK banking licence after years of scrutiny, do you see this as part of a broader shift where fintech platforms are evolving into fully regulated banks?…

We’ve moved from simplicity to fragmentation and now we’re struggling with the consequences. In short, we’ve built a highly fragmented financial world in the name of innovation and now the next phase is about reconnecting it, simplifying it, and making it usable again. By way of example, you have to launch several different apps to…

A chat with Wio Bank, a fully digital, platform-based bank – I recently had a nudge to talk to Wio Bank, who claim to be the Middle East’s first fully digital, platform-based bank launched in Abu Dhabi in 2022 (not sure about this as there are over 20 neobanks operating in the Middle East). Backed…

I’ve just read the regulatory roadmap that the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority released this week and realised that it is less a neat plan and more a recognition that the current system is broken and we’ve run out of road with Open Banking. For the past decade, Open Banking has been the poster child of…

We love to throw phrases around to try to ground the next generation of banking. I was lucky enough to coin the phrase “digital bank” and “banking-as-a-service” years ago, and have now moved on to “intelligent bank” (coming out soon). For those who read my blog regularly, you will know that I see this as…

I read Jamie Dimon’s latest annual letter released yesterday. It has become, for many, one of the best benchmark letters to read about the state of banking each year and, as always, it’s less a report card on JPMorgan Chase and more a reflection on the state of the world. What struck me most is…

I just found an interesting report on fintech in Germany, a place I’ve spent a lot of time with the likes of N26, Trade Republic, Mambu, Raisin and Solaris. That is just to name a few! The reality is that there are hundreds of fintechs in Germany – “more than 700” according to the German…

I was talking to an insider friend in the Revolut empire yesterday and he implied that Revolut is in talks to acquire a major Asian bank in its expansion across the region. I asked him which bank? but he kept schtum. So, I was thinking about it and wondered if it could be DBS? DBS operates…

Short summary: Tokenization is not new, but dates back 10,000 years when early societies used clay tokens to record ownership of goods. These were not money, but data tools to track value. Modern digital tokens and blockchain systems are simply the latest evolution, but can now do more than just record transactions. We can now…

I had a great chat the other day – the first in a series of three – with Quant’s Chief Product Officer Martin Hargreaves about programmable liquidity. What’s that? Read on … Programmable liquidity: five foundations reshaping modern treasury How is programmable money reshaping treasury operations and financial infrastructure? This conversation moved beyond theoretical frameworks…