Digital Bank

I’ve seen a few big deals signed this month to get banks onto the cloud, such as National Australia Bank (NAB) switching to Microsoft’s Azure, and Deutsche Bank moving to the Google Cloud. McKinsey expect that cloud usage will rise from less than a quarter of banks business being cloud-based to anything between 40 and 90…

Years and years ago, I did a business process analysis for an insurance company. One of the people I met there and interviewed said: “We’ve bred a group of box tickers and button pushers” This was, in context, about their underwriters. They ticked boxes and pushed buttons. Their process was black and white: you’re either…

I have a few friends around the world that I pick up on, and The World Bank and CGAP are amongst that crew. Therefore, when I saw that Peter Zetterli, senior financial sector specialist with CGAP, was blogging about financial inclusion I couldn’t but help reach out to him and ask him to write a…

This could be a serious mistake, as I’m an old guy who wasn’t born for rapping, but I can’t help myself. I woke up today and thought: you should make a rap video. Stupid, I know, but can’t help myself. My wife actually wandered into the office as I recorded this and said: are you ok?…

In surfing this week, I found a great article on my friend Amit Goel‘s website GoMedici.com. The company has just completed a deep dive into the world of challenger banks or, as they term them, neobanks. The time for neobanks is now. Here’s their summary of thinking: Neobanking 2.0: Global Deep Dive 2020 Just like…

I recently did a podcast and webinar with the Institute for International Finance (IIF). The timing was great because they’ve just produced a set of three reports about digital transformation in partnership with Deloitte. I can thoroughly recommend the three reports so here they are: Realizing the Digital Promise: Part 1 Realizing the Digital Promise:…

During my MoneyBox interview about Wirecard (see end of this blog), Paul asked me the question: how could this happen again? What’s next? And I said, we learn from our mistakes. Progress never stops. Wirecard won’t shut down FinTech. It will amend it. This means this is not the end of Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS), but an…

Another day and another headline about Wirecard: ‘The money’s gone’: Wirecard collapses owing $4 billion Wirecard’s Missing Billions Forces Out CEO, Panics Lenders Wirecard: Former boss arrested over €1.9bn scandal How Wirecard fooled most of the people all of the time Inside Wirecard EY failed to ask for Wirecard bank statements for 3 years Softbank…

A friend of mine, Alessandro Hatami, wrote an interesting piece on Sifted that I shared in my news yesterday. He claims that neobanks like Monzo and Starling are not reinventing banking at all. They’re just modifying and improving it. Alessandro then goes on to cite the key things that banking should really focus upon: There…

Forbes just launched a list of the world’s best banks, based upon a survey of over 40,000 consumers in partnership with Statista. I’m always wary of such surveys as, like influencer lists, they often reflect the world they want and miss a lot of what’s really happening. Nevertheless, there are some interesting comments in the dialogue…