Digital Bank

For no particular reason, I was reflecting on being a boomer the other day. Probably it was to do with the speed of change. After all, when I was a lad, there was no tech at home. I played with Batman and James Bond Corgi toys – which I still do – and that was…

For quite a while, I have been amazed by China’s innovations in fintech from Ant to WeBank. My first visit to a Chinese bank in the 1990s, they were using Abacuses to calculate transactions; now they use rocket science in the form of AI. A lot of this was covered in depth in the deep…

Dealing with financial abuse It only came to my attention recently in talking about these things with those trying to solve the issues is that financial abuse is as prominent as domestic abuse. If you beat up your partner, you can see the physical bruises; but what about if you coercively control your partner or…

The internet was launched in the 1990s based upon generations of technologies that went before. It was designed for the exchange of information, not value. Now, we live in a networked world of information and value exchange, and are trying to retrofit the mechanisms for commerce to a flawed structure. That is why we are…

Revolut just dropped their annual report and the numbers are simply stunning. In 2024, Revolut processed over £1 trillion in transaction volume, a 52% jump from the previous year, and customer deposits grew to £30 billion. Extraordinary fact: Revolut now serves more customers than HSBC! The question I hear you ask is: why? Why are…

I’m listening to a fascinating podcast from the BBC about Whisky Bandits. The scam is that you buy a cask of whisky for thousands of dollars, but the cask you bought does not exist. In other words, you just got a piece of paper saying that you own a cask or, in simpler terms, you…

For centuries, we’ve relied on paper, plastic, and people to prove who we are. A signature, a passport, a nod from someone who knows you — the analogue scaffolding of identity. But in a world where everything is going digital, why are we still treating identity like it’s 1995? Let me be blunt: digital identity…

In a disturbing new development using AI, I can generate a fake passport in minutes that would fool Revolut and Binance for account opening. This was a discovery by Polish researcher Borys Musielak using ChatGPT-4o, who created a fake passport in five minutes You can now generate fake passports with GPT-4o. It took me 5…

I’m working on my next book which is due for release in spring 2026. The theme is all around how to trust in a deep fake world. As a result, I’ve been talking to a lot of people – technologists, bankers, policymakers, ethicists, hackers (some reformed, some not) – and the conversations is around the…

Back in the day, Brett King had this idea of starting a mobile-first bank. It was when Bank 2.0 took off, and I was one of the first investors. We ended up enjoying a day of brainstorming in an American park retreat, and developed the line “spend, save, and live smarter”, which is still there…