Digital Bank

During the summer, there’s been a lot of news about cash. A new €500 banknote is coming whilst, on the converse, a lot of people have been discussing life using cash. Is cash still relevant? Do we need new banknotes? Well … here’s the lowdown. I am guessing that most of the cash discussions were…

Some years ago, I remember a Chinese lender, Jiedaibao by JDCapital, asking applicants to send them a nude photo to get the loan. The photo would be kept private unless the loan defaulted. If payments were missed, the photo would be shared online to all your friends and contacts. That’s a good way to ensure…

Lots of discussions these days are about AI. AI this, AI that, AI movie, AI influencers, even AI pop. (the K-pop group Mave do not exist – they are generated by AI) Every day, these developments shock and intrigue me. But what does this mean for banking and finance? Well, I guess there are some…

We’ve had DeFi, CeFi, ReFi and more, but now it’s time for GeFi. If those phrases confuse you, we have Decentralised Finance versus Centralised Finance; we have Regenerative Finance, and now we have Generative Finance, or GeFi for short. What is GeFi? It’s the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into finance. This all started with…

I blogged about tokenizing everything the other day and my friend Efi made an interesting post the other day, related to this, about a report from the Boston Consulting Group. The report focuses upon India, which claims to be the third largest FinTech economy behind America and Britain, and specifically calls out a few key…

When I was a lad – a good start for any commentary – we didn’t know nothing about money. I got pocket money from my dad but, if I begged hard enough and long enough, my dad would relent and buy me that Batman Corgi car I had been lusting after. At school, they taught…

It’s interesting how trends rise. Over the past few years, I’ve been writing a lot about the impact of ESG and AI on banking, so it intrigued me to see a new survey of over 300 bankers about what’s new in banking. Key findings of the report include: Emerging innovations such as AI are cited as…

I was asking the other day whether it is better or worse that my children play video games rather than watch movies, and the reaction was: time moves on. It surely does. The gaming industry is now bigger than Hollywood and music combined, so what do I know? According to a report by SuperData Research,…

A few people got excited about the news this week that Mercedes-Benz had launched in-car fingerprint payments in partnership with Mastercard. I didn’t. In fact, it still amazes me how little we have developed since my days at NCR, then owned by AT&T. This was the 1990s and AT&T had this fantastic set of adverts…

I was intrigued by a new report from the IMF (International Monetary Fund) which states that: “if the use of fintech grows rapidly outside of the regulated sector, it can generate risks to market conduct and integrity”. Shock, horror! And so? “New fintech developments might quickly become systemic due to network effects (for example, when…