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…
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…
I just picked up this report by Finextra and ACI Worldwide on Payments in the year 2030. The research surveyed over 160 people in C-level financial roles around the world and found that most of them are still thinking about how to move to cloud-based solutions; still grappling with how to do real-time payments; still…
We all revel in the buoyance of fintechs succeeding. What about those who fail? Notable fintech failures include BlockFi: A crypto lending and exchange company that collapsed during the 2022 crypto crisis, partly due to its relationship with FTX (FTX was a fintech failure as was MtGox). Then there are companies like Fast, a one-click checkout company…
