Digital Bank

“When I was a lad, I got four shillings and sixpence every week for pocket money.” “Luxury! I was whipped in two by my dad and lived in a shoebox by the motorway!” says my friend. OK, enough revival of old Monty Python sketches, but the point is that children do need to know about…

Everyone is talking a lot about the metaverse these days. What is the metaverse? It’s a progression of how we live. My father used to read books as a kid, and the books would entertain him and come life in his head. I grew up with comics and the illustrations would give me hours of…

I had a friend who bought a load of bitcoin for around $10 each and then sold them to buy a house. If he had kept them, he could have ten houses today. I have another friend who invested heavily in ETH, the coin of Ethereum. Today, they smile and sit pretty, whilst millions of…

I was really surprised to see the announcement by Zopa this week that they were pulling out of P2P (peer-to-peer) lending. As the company that started the FinTech P2P lending and FinTech buzz imho, how could they? I was angry and annoyed, and then remembered something: Following consultation, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is introducing…

I grew up with a belief that life should be simple. You get an education; you play sport; you get a job for life; you get a partner; you get married; you buy a house; you have kids; you retire; and then you die. Or something like that. These were the key life events. It’s…

I saw the news that landlines are due to be dead by 2025 in the UK. Shame? Nah, who uses a landline these days? Twenty years ago, we depended on dial-up lines for AOL.  Today, with WiFi and mobile everywhere, we’ve moved on. It made me reflect on other technologies that are defunct and…

A long time ago, I predicted that telecoms and retailers would acquire and buy banks and vice versa. Hasn’t happened. Will it happen? I don’t think so. After so many years, I’ve realised something. Banking is difficult and does not have the same features as other industries. This is something that the naivety of youth…

I just picked up this chart from Systems Innovation … …. and it immeditately struck me how complicated the world is. Way back when I started out as a programmer – maybe I should go back there? – and most of my programming was greenfield. But I remember having to update a system with 30,000…

One of my regular rants is that, even with all of this innovation and disruption with technology, no one has really reinvented banking and finance. The nearest we get are companies like Ant Group, PayTM, NuBank and a few others who are offering truly differentiated financial services, but the majority are just sorting out what…

I see five major groups squeezing the financial markets these days. The first one is obvious: it’s the FinTech start-up community, which is now valued as a third of all banking value. The second is clear too: it’s the Big Tech firms like Facebook and Amazon, who are launching their own currencies and putting pressure…