Digital Bank

I keep thinking about what an Intelligent Bank means. What is an Intelligent Bank? Well, strip it back to basics. An Intelligent Bank is a bank that is so embedded and intimate with my digital finance that it can predict what I should do, could do and can do next. It knows when I’m being…

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 talk a lot about how digitalisation is simplifying everything, yet it feels like the opposite is happening. Yes, I no longer need to go to a bank branch to deposit a cheque – does anyone remember those days? – but I do have to go through an awful lot of clicks and checks before…

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…

I asked AI to tell me about the future of banking the other day. It responded with a great set of answers: The future of banking is being reshaped by technology, shifting customer expectations, and new regulatory and economic realities. Here are the key trends that will define the next 5–10 years: 💡 1. Banking…

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…