Digital Bank

We are living in a cost of living crisis. Boil this down to the essentials: can you afford to live? Many of us cannot. Energy bills have gone through the roof; basic essentials from food to shampoo are twice the cost they were; and the idea of a holiday for many has become a dream,…

The internet isn’t working today. My phone is stuck on a screen saying trying to connect. My laptop has this continuing circle of stuckness. It is seriously annoying. When digital breaks down, it leaves you stranded. That’s OK. It’s cool. Except that, when you depend upon digital, it screws up your day, especially for those…

During 2023 a change has taken place in banking that has been little reported or, at least in my circles, little discussed. The change is Basel IV. A bit like most regulations, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) review and update their rules every five to ten years or so, and gradually introduce more…

Six years ago, I wrote about John Cryan, the then CEO of Deutsche Bank, saying that most people in the bank would lose their jobs to AI. He stated at a German conference that “people behaving like robots doing mechanical things, tomorrow we’re going to have robots behaving like people”. Thirty years ago, showing my…

If banking was delivered like a song, how would it feel? Would it have emotion and belief, or just be delivered as words and music by a robot? The difference between customer engagement and customer service is pretty much the difference between delivering a stage song and being on the stage. I am a huge…

In a land known as Fed, there are two superheroes: AML and KYC. They fly around the world looking for villains attacking the financial markets and aim to zap them. It is a difficult task, and getting more and more difficult every day, but they try … and they fail. In 2009, the estimated annual…

I was asked to come onto a news channel this week to talk about the state of banking. The latest Q3 results have come in, and most of the banks have stonking results thanks to interest rates rising. Increasing rates rapidly on loans, whilst dragging feet on savings rates, created a basis points differential that…

I see so much discussion of AI and cloud in finance, and realised the other day that we have created a whole new risk structure on top of banking and finance. The systemic risk of failure if a cloud provider goes down or an AI system goes rogue. This is a question raised the other…

Everyone who knows me well, knows that I grew up with David Bowie as my real-life Hero. I saw him concert regularly, until he stopped touring in the 2000s, and loved the fact that not only did he produce unique music, but nearly every time it was performance and music. He was first to really…

I’ve been sitting and thinking. Not a bad thing, but a dangerous thing. I’ve been sitting and thinking about AI, Artificial Intelligence. How will AI change banking and finance? Specifically, how could we use AI to change banking and finance? When I think about this, I think about how banking has changed since the last…