Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

Digital Bank

ECB with DLT and CBDC create RTP via TARGET2 for T+0

I made this headline immediately challenging for anyone not in my space, as it incorporates all the TLAs (three letter arconyms) to confuse and abuse you. A fascinating release from Europe’s Central Bank announced that they aim to move soon to distributed ledger technology (DLT) settlements for payments last week. What did the announcement say?…

Why do we trust the network?

I found a fun meme on Facebook about passwords. Passwords. What??? When I was a lad, we didn’t have passwords and usernames. What has the world become? Well, it’s become a world of people who are dumb and stupid and create passwords that are ridiculous and easily hackable. For example, the world’s most popular passwords are 123456,…

Jamie Dimon: f*** off WFH

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, held an internal town hall meeting last week and got onto the subject of working from home (WFH). It turns out he doesn’t like it. In a lengthy foul-mouthed rant, he tells staffers that it’s full of sh*t. Here’s a short part of the tirade, as discovered by Barron’s…

Is the world spinning too fast due to technology?

Almost every day these days is an AI headline, but this video really struck me. It is showing the selfies we would have taken in historical times: Can you imagine? The reason it struck me is that you have to wonder today what is real online and what is not. The more our networked system…

Is BaaS dead?

I see a lot of people writing that Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) is dead. That saddens me a little, as I created the term twenty years ago – have I mentioned this before? – but I agree. It is now past its prime. It was replaced by open banking. Then there was embedded finance and today it is…

The challenges of dealing with digital identity

Like many, I’m still working on the idea of authentication, verification and identification using immutable technologies or, more specifically, distributed ledger technologies (DLT). There are many firms active in this space, trying to create digital identity systems using DLT, but it is far more complicated than such a simple solution. The reason is that the…

If you have no access to your bank, why would you use that bank?

There’s been a bunch of headlines in the last week of online banking failures whilst, at the same time, another group of headlines of bank branch closures because customers should use digital banking. Barclays hit by major IT outage on tax deadline day – BBC News Moment customers surge around Barclays’ cash machines for ‘free…

The big issue: 2025 commerce is connected to a 2005 checkout system

In an excellent article on LinkedIn, Priscilla Russo laments the state of Agentic AI from a payments point of view. Bearing in mind that 2025 is the year of Agentic AI – a world where AI agents do everything for you on your behalf – it is clear that we have a dichotomy between the open…

What is the next big thing?

A quantum financial system, or QFS for short Maybe it’s the way my feeds are set up, but every day seems like a headline about cryptocurrency and AI these days. Take my daily things worth reading, and here’s a few examples just from last Monday. On crypto: Trump orders crypto working group to draft new…

Who wants payments on X?

As a long-term and dedicated user of facebook and twitter since the 2000s, it is weird to find that, today, they are no longer useful tools. The feeds are now stacked with Mark Zuckerberg updates, Musk propaganda and worse. The only tool that’s still useful is LinkedIn, although there are issues there too. So it…