Digital Bank

I find it so interesting the debate about CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies), stablecoins (a digital currency backed by real world assets) and cryptocurrencies (a digital currency backed by the decentralised network of everyone). This is the biggest battleground for the future of how we trade and are paid, and the losers appear to be…

My friend Ron Shevlin was putting some shade on Starbucks app this week. The reason is that some claim Starbucks is a bank because their prepaid app is so popular. Ron claims it is just PNBL – Pay Now, Buy Later – and is nothing to do with being a bank. The thing about his view…

I just got a whole new set of tech phrases from a Gartner report. Giving my interpretation, here we go: Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS) is a proposed framework for Device Direct connectivity using satellite and cellular communication combination. The framework enables partnership between satellite (specifically low Earth orbit [LEO]) providers and terrestrial mobile operators…

After my blog yesterday about mortgage by machines, I left out one key component: humans. You have to remember that machines don’t think, they only appear to think because we develop them that way. Sure, there may be sentient machines at some point in the future when we get to the great Singularity but, until…

When I was a lad, to get a mortgage was a complex process. You would go to the bank for a meeting with the branch manager. The branch manager would assess you, your job security, work status and salary and, if all boxes were ticked, you could get a mortgage up to four times your…

I have blogged often about change and how people avoid it (who moved my cheese?), but it cropped up again the other day when I was reading Harvard’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter* thoughts on business. She has six key principles for business: Show up. Speak up. Look up. Team up. Never give up. Lift others up. Many…

My presentations these days are focused upon the challenge of change. Every day, something is in the headlines to challenge your thinking from AI to quantum to digital currencies to digital identities. The only constant is change. Whenever I talk, I come back to the wrongly attributed quotation of Charles Darwin that it does not…

I was really interested that Barclays Private Bank published an interview about AI the other day. Why? Because it’s the private bank and it’s from a bank. The interview is with Professor Michael Wooldridge, one of Oxford University’s leading AI academics with more than 450 research papers to his name. He knows his stuff. What…

I’m about to have a week in Kuala Lumpur, if anyone wants to meet-up, with a focus on Islamic Finance. I remember twenty years ago talking with Mike Hanlon who was founding the Islamic Bank of Britain (IBB), and he was telling me how UK Gov really did not understand the concept. What is the…

My friend Paolo Sironi of the IBM Institute of Business Value has been touting his latest research: the 94% core banking problem. What’s it all that about? Well, it’s about how digital transformation or, as IBM calls it modernization, hasn’t delivered. In research conducted with a global survey of over 500 CIO’s and almost 200…