Digital Bank

Part of the reason why I started debating the point about bank branches is that there are places where you cannot find one for love or money. In many places in the UK now, customers are being forced to make an hour long round trip to get cash or pay in a cheque. Some face a…

For as long as I can remember, we have had a debate around whether, to be a retailer, you need stores? As a retail bank, do you need branches? The predictions from the early 2000’s have been that branches and stores will close. It’s certainly true that many have. I’ve blogged about this often and probably…

Yesterday, I stated that most banks will not disappear. Today, I’m in the other side of the ring and saying that most banks will disappear. They won’t disappear as banks. They will just disappear as something we think about. Banking will become invisible. The industry likes to talk about embedded banking, a term that is…

Five years ago, Gartner published a report stating that 80 percent of financial institutions would disappear by 2030. Most banks will be made irrelevant by 2030 – Gartner Within 12 years’ time, 80% of financial firms will either go out of business or be rendered irrelevant by new competition, changing customer behaviour and advancements in…

I love it when there’s a case study about animal behaviours. Bearing in mind that apes are our closest relations, when scientists try experiments to see how they behave towards money, it is fascinating. This is something I’ve blogged about many times before, with a favourite example being the Capuchin monkeys who discovered that they…

I just had a new dawning, but maybe not. The realisation was that the decentralisation of everything – finance, money, government, service, chat – is all down to technology. Centralisation of everything is all down to physicality. It’s like the dichotomy between the State, which is analogue, and Society, which is now digital. This is…

I’ve said that my old bank is deficient for some time. Specifically, no alerts of transactions so I have to open the app to see when something is paid; no detail of transactions, just something like ABC CORP TX 3201984 on my statement; zero detail about where I’m spending money, just a date and a…

Last week the European Central Bank issued a report on the state of digital transformation across European banks, and announced that they were not only interested in this space but would be supervising it. Yay! Disappointingly for me, the report and perspectives fell well short of what I think of as truly digital. Here’s their announcement…

I recently stumbled across traceable-time-as-a-service (TTaaS) and found it fascinating, especially as time is purely something we invented. “Time does not exist. We invented it.” Some guy called Albert pic.twitter.com/JS9JMfEyJk — Chris Skinner (@Chris_Skinner) August 28, 2021 That’s why China – the fourth largest country on Earth – has one single time zone. At 7:00,…

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak posted an update on LinkedIn the other day, saying how brilliant Britain is for foreign investments. That’s kind of no surprise, coming from the office of the person who wants foreign investment, but I did take note of one paragraph specifically: Despite challenging economic times, lots of sectors are flourishing. As…