I was sitting the other day thinking about the good old days. In the good old days, if something was big and challenging, banks would get together and create a co-operative to solve the problem. SWIFT, Visa and MasterCard were all bank created co-operatives. Admittedly, times have changed and now Visa and MasterCard are private…
So everyone’s excited about Fintech, but Fintech is nothing new. Fintech is actually pretty old. I could claim that if Fintech is about providing technology platforms to exchange finance, then that’s been around since banks first implemented technology platforms in the 1960s. In fact, I do claim that banks are Fintech companies. They are the…
As I make my travels around the world, some markets are open to new financial players but most are pretty closed. Regulators lock out new innovative models, and enable incumbents to be protected or allowed the luxury of time to respond. Peer-to-peer lending is a good example for whilst there are hundreds of crowdfunding and…
What happens when the cost of payments reaches zero, the speed of payments is instant, and everyone globally can make and take a payment, what happens then? I just had an interesting chat with someone and realised two things: one is that we’re talking about moving away from batch to real-time, and that’s where the…
Yesterday I said something better change, and it is. This blog has covered extensively how things are changing in payments, retail and commercial banking, but I haven’t covered investment banking or asset management as much. So here's an insight sourced from yesterday's Financial Times. According to a poll of 400 senior executives by State Street, the custodian…
A true story. The year is 1990 I’m travelling and getting the last train home. Arriving at the station, I discover the last train has gone. Darnit. I’m homeless for the night. OK. Let’s find a hotel. I look for the nearest telephone box. Luckily there’s one at the station entrance. In the telephone box,…
I presented at a great conference last week on how ot start a bank. The conference featured some fine discussions of the challenges and opportunities of opening a new bank in Britain, and included a presentation from Victoria Raffé. Victoria was, until recently, the go to person fornprocessing bank licence applications with the Financial Conduct…
I picked up a few amazing quotes this week. The first was someone telling me about the payments conference they attended where one of the large UK banks (HBOS, part of Lloyds Banking Group) said that their customers were now moving to mobile only. Apparently, in the last yaer, one in five of their customers…
