Digital Bank

New banks have great opportunities. They can fix all the things old banks do badly, using a clean sheet of paper. But sometimes they get it wrong. For example, many are fans of Monzo, one of the fastest growing UK challenger banks. I’m a fan, but have noticed one issue that keeps getting social media…

I had an interesting comment the other day from a friend who said that he had worked with incumbents and start-ups. The big difference is that the incumbent views digital as a cost-cutting exercise, whilst the start-up sees it as a customer-enhancing opportunity. It rang a bell with me. Having spent so long dealing with…

I saw an interesting letter in Metro the other day: A world where you can be financially cancelled A thought on what is described as ‘cancel culture’. Once all money is digital, the ability will exist to cancel people from buying or selling anything, just as they can be cancelled from social media today. Will…

I never used the Apple wallet until recently. Reason being that I didn’t need to. Then the pandemic hit, and I wanted to avoid using cash, so all of my cards that would work with Apple loaded into the phone. Interestingly some cards would not load but hey, contactless and cardless is the way. Then…

I stumbled across an interesting white paper from Citi the other day saying that the metaverse is an $8 to $13 TRILLION opportunity: “The total addressable market for the Metaverse could be between $8 trillion and $13 trillion by 2030, with total Metaverse users numbering around five billion. But getting to that market level is…

I don’t know why we talk about digital transformation when we should be simply talking about transformation. What is happening has nothing to do with technologies, but is driven by technological change. In other words, it’s not a digital transformation. It’s a change management transformation, and all those familiar with change management will be aware…

I was reminded the other day of a quote by Ronald Reagan: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” He said this in the 1980s about the government’s view of the economy, but let’s apply it to cryptocurrencies. Initially irrelevant but now mainstream, many…

I’ve been looking at where we are in 2022, compared with 2012. In 2012, everyone was talking about FinTech disrupting and destroying the dinosaur banks; in 2022, banks are buying FinTechs and even launching their own start-up FinTechs Things have changed. I blogged a while ago about the phases of FinTech we’re going through, and can…

If you didn’t read my blog last week asking whether the pandemic had transformed banking to be digital forever (answer: no), what is obvious is that the pandemic has changed consumer behaviours forever. This was brought home to me when reading the Forbes-Ipsos survey of American consumers views of digital banking. The survey took place in…

I haven’t written much about Facebook’s digital currency Diem, as there’s not much to write about. A dead duck from day one, it would never succeed. I said so back when it launched in 2019: The bottom-line is that Facebook may have developed a stablecoin using blockchain to enable global payments within Messenger, Instagram and…