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Shaping the future of finance

Digital Bank

The logic of digital change

I just went through a conversation about my presentation for a forthcoming conference. They didn’t want to provide a prescriptive approach, and just asked what I talked about in general. That’s a challenge, as I once turned up at a conference and they said to me “you have seven hours”. I took eight. So, here…

Challenger banks don’t matter as they’re not a primary account

During Money 2020 Europe, I bumped into a chap from Monzo. No names mentioned, but he was buzzing and no wonder. The start-up has just boomed through two million users and is growing at over 60,000 account openings a week or 10,000 per day. Some think that number seems high, but they may have missed…

The war for (banking tech) talent

I had an interesting discussion about hiring technology people into banks the other day. The challenge of finding top coders is a big one, as there’s an awful lot of other firms to join out there. You could join a hot FinTech unicorn like Monzo, SoFi, Stripe, Ant Financial, Ping An or many of the…

Customers don’t want digital banking

So my snarky little friend Ron Shevlin wrote a piece on Forbes claiming that Americans don’t want a digital bank. As the guy who wrote the book Digital Bank you might think I would take offence to such a statement, but no. I agree with his content, just not his headline. His content states: 10…

Does your bank look like this?

Henry Ford famously stated: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Of course they would, as they had no idea what anything else was. In fact, I use this story often as a Victorian vision of the future was a steam-powered robot horse. The reason they wanted this…

FinTech or TechFin (speech transcript)

I recently gave a speech where the title was FinTech or TechFin?  Everyone had been given a copy of my book Digital Human, and the speech was transcribed. Here it is:   FinTech or TechFin?  Thank you for inviting me to join you here. It is a great honour. I’m a technologist and spent all my…

Digital is a leadership challenge and not a project

I blogged in March (Transforming the bank – three phases of change) about the method to make systems change happen to transform the bank. In another conversation, I then realised that there are three phases of organisational change to transform the bank. The first phase is a recognition that the world is transforming in a…

What does your leadership look like?

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…

Cloud sense … dollars and cents

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…

Banking in the Cloud

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…

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