Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

Digital Bank

When the banks closed, no-one cared

A great headline posted in The Financial Times the other day:  When the banks closed in Wuhan, nobody cared The Financial Times article makes clear how advanced the Chinese economy is today. For several months this year, banks across Hubei province, an area home to 60 million people, shut their doors to retail customers. Most…

FinTech challenger and neobanks in Brazil

I stumbled across a great article about Brazilian neobanks the other day. Bearing in mind that Nubank is the most successful neobank in the world, with 25 million users at the start of June. As a result, when I saw a great article about banks in Brazil by Contexto, who cover FinTech LatAm, could I…

Hey bank, get onto my cloud!

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…

Apple Card #fail?

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…

Digital Banking for the Poor

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…

Chris Skinner’s FinTech Rap

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?…

Neobanks: are they really challenging?

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…

Realising the digital dream (free research)

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:…

BaaS works, it’s the regulations that don’t

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…