Digital Bank

I was struck by a comment made on LinkedIn that most media miss what’s going on in the rest of the world. In this case, it was a comment about Starling Bank getting plaudits for being the first challenger to be profitable. What it should have said is the first challenger to be profitable in the…

I wrote this the other day for Channel News Asia: FinTech firms may look like banks soon The gist of my thread is that, due to Ant Group offloading all of their risk to banks, the authorities are now stepping in to say that any innovator, even one as big as Ant, needs to be…

The lockdown pandemic has been interesting from a financial markets’ perspective. First, people withdrew as much cash as they could, worrying that things would be bad, and cash was king. It wasn’t. They didn’t need the cash. They didn’t spend it. In fact, I was particularly struck by this chart from McKinsey’s report on payments…

It’s 2020 and, since I was born in 19-whenever it was, I cannot think of a more challenging year. We are being forced to isolate, stay indoors, go nowhere and stay well. As I’ve blogged a few times, that’s good news for digital but bad news for humanity. I think this year has really brought…

As I ponder the world and everything, this article by Jemima Kelly in The Financial Times keeps coming back to me: The virus has crushed the challenger bank dream In it she says things like: There comes a time in your life that you realise that some of the friends you used to consider good…

I don’t usually cover press releases as they bore me, but this one caught my attention: Customer Online Conversations Reveal ‘All to Play for’ in Battle between Challengers and Incumbent Banks, Finds Economist Intelligence Unit Report   Groundbreaking report by The Economist Intelligence Unit uses machine-learning to analyse over 10 million online conversations about personal…

Stumbling over an interesting article about bank consolidation in Europe, reminded me of Francisco Gonzalez’s (former Chair of BBVA) prediction that there’s only enough room for a maximum of fifty banks globally. I don’t believe either. As written about yesterday, banks don’t disappear. They don’t die. For over a quarter of a century, there’s been…

Have you noticed how people talk about disruption more and more, and note the collapse of companies like Blockbuster, Kodak, Nokia and Thomas Cook? In fact, there are more companies entering and leaving the stock market lists than ever before, with the average tenancy now under two decades compared to six decades or more in…

I’m running a survey around how this crisis has impacted physical versus digital access to services – please take the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/KCSBYMM … and you will get a free copy of the results – but, building on the physical versus digital debate,  it really hit me as I listened to a great debate on the…

Yet again, I’m returning to the story of branches. There are so many reports about the branch of the future and the end of branch banking out there that you would think the world of branches had no future. The debate is pretty pointless to be honest, as there will always be some who think…