Digital Bank

I often come back to the trough of banking licenses, but if banks didn’t have banking licenses, why would we need them? A banking license is not just about compensation and insurance schemes, but about trust, trade, risk, regulation and returns. More than this, once a bank has a license it can lend, something an…

I was having a candid chat with a banking friend about life, the world and money, and he asked me a series of questions: How do we change culture to meet today’s fast-moving changes? How can we be more agile? How important are partnerships? Can we work with FinTechs? How will we work with them?…

I talk a lot about the platform economy where the network joins us all together. In that economy, like life on Earth, there are many players. 1000’s of companies, millions of people and billions of capital. The question is: how to connect them? The answer is to be a connector in the connected economy, and…

We all know the world is changing. Every day, we see things changing. The only constant is change. This makes the state we live in today very interesting. I can send a crypto payment from London to Nairobi instantly but, for various reasons, I cannot make a payment to my own account today. That is…

I recently wrote a white paper for XBP Europe, which you can download (see later). It’s all about how to be fit for the future and digital transformation, my usual subjects. Just to give a taste of the paper, here’s a small extract: The obvious answer is to digitise the corporation. The harder question is:…

Ever since Trov, the real-time insurance firm, appeared on the scene, I’ve been wondering what else could real-time finance do. If you are not aware, Trōv allows you to insure a smartphone or laptop or anything else you value for hours, even minutes. The company no longer exists – it was acquired by Travelers Insurance…

Trust and money and day-to-day life go hand-in-hand. It’s all about who you deal with, how and the outcomes. Recently, I’ve lost trust with Apple, my bank, my friend and my brother. That’s pretty sad, isn’t it? But who do I trust? David Bowie. David Bowie, RIP. Artist, music man, alien and hero. He was…

I’ve thought for years that we are moving towards perfect market knowledge, where demand and supply information becomes equal to all buyers and sellers. Now that we have OpenAI and Gemini, are we getting there? During the 1990s, I spent a lot of time discussing neural networking where we could pair stocks to buy and…

I was talking with a friend about growing up. Back in my day, as the old farts say, I had cash and a bank account. I had one bank account and that was it. During the years, I moved around a bit, switched accounts between banks, but cash, cheques and card was it. Then a…

“AI, powered by quantum computing, is going to put financial crime potentially on steroids.” It’s not my quote. It’s actually a comment made by David Duffy, CEO of Virgin Money (now Nationwide) after visiting Microsoft’s headquarters in Seattle. From my side, this is an area that’s been worrying me for a while, ever since the…