Digital Bank

I’m sure some people see me walk into a room and go oh no, not him. I have a position, and it’s not popular with everyone. But I don’t care. On my LinkedIn profile, I describe myself as a troublemaker, and no issue, I’m sticking with that. So, boot on the other foot, I often…

Talking of cloud computing, I’ve spent years backing up my various PCs and photo libraries. Invariably, a labour of love, I didn’t trust public cloud services like Google and Microsoft to look after my stuff properly. Then, gradually, over time, more and more of my stuff has moved online. It started with getting fed up…

One of the surprises I have had in my discussions with banks that are doing digital well, is how all of them seem profoundly committed to cloud-computing. Some more than others, as one of the banks I spoke to wants to achieve over 80% of their IT infrastructure, software and services to be private and…

I picked up an interesting article from Reuters, about how Asian technology firms are moving into banking in a different way to Europe or America. The article says that Amazon and Alphabet / Google are far more interested in serving banks with cloud and advertising, rather than competing with them, whereas Alibaba and Tencent have…

I’ve recently seen two blogs about issues with challenger banks N26 and Tandem. They both relate to the ways in which these new banks communicate, or not in these cases. Judith Bogner, a well-known and followed broadcaster, explains regarding N26 and the fact that her husband was locked out of his account and so he…

During the weekend I presented the trends on FinTech and Tech Fin, my two favourite subjects. I’ll update on that shortly but I was also involved in a study the organisers – The European House Ambrosetti, a leading economics think tank based in Italy – conducted before the conference. The study looked at the bank…

I find life interesting. Themes recur over and over and over again. Will big banks survive? When will we, will we be cashless? Oh when, will we, will be branchless? Can we really replace the City with a trading network of algorithms? And more. One of my favourite recurring themes is when will we have…

I was in conversation with a banker the other day and we got around to regulations and regulators, as many conversations with banks tend to do. There were some interesting reflections in that dialogue, however. I guess it falls into three categories: the way regulations used to be; the way they are; the way they…

I find it interesting when I read perspectives on FinTech, money and banking. Going digital, getting rid of branches, becoming cashless seem to be the main themes, and yet this ignores that every part of the world is different. It’s hard to go digital if the country has little infrastructure; it doesn’t make sense to…

I used to blog about blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) almost once a week … four years ago. Today, I hardly blog about it at all. I guess it just shows what’s top of mind and what’s not at any time in FinTech and, right now, blockchain is not top of mind. In fact,…