Digital Bank

So, I’ve been summarising other people’s views of the year ahead from a variety of sources, but I also wrote two outline pieces for my friends at The Banker magazine and Jim Marous’s The Financial Brand. Just to finish off my week’s blogs about this year, here’s what I wrote. From The Banker: Why ‘real time’ will…

There has been a lot of thinking and rethinking during 2018 about blockchain, cryptocurrencies, bitcoin and everything digital currency related. I wrote about the challenges getting blockchains implemented for example, and was surprised to find myself enduing up as a network meme. The power of the pundit, ay? Last year we saw bitcoin drop from…

I was listening to a great discussion about innovation (again) amongst a group of innovative bankers. As the conversation progressed, it made me reflect on a few things. In particular, how the conversation about innovation has changed over the past decade. Just before the financial crisis hit, innovation was big on the banks’ agendas. In…

I present regularly to retail, commercial and investment banks, wealth managers and fund managers, insurance companies and more about how technology is transforming everything. I often can feel a sense of cynicism in the room. We’ve heard all this before and yes, I’ve pointed this out several times: The boy who cried wolf (FinTech style)…

Another day and another discussion about digital transformation with a group of bankers. As the conversation progressed, several of the attendees touched on a subject in different ways but the core of what they were asking was this: when will we know we’ve done digital? I find this question quite vexing, as it shows a…

I just got back from Russia recently where I was interviewed by one of their leading journals. The journalist had read Digital Human, and took a very Russian take on it. His first question was along the lines of: if we are automating so much, then the people who own the robots will get richer…

I haven’t given away my slides and presentation for a while, as it’s part of my unique armoury, but I’m bored with my latest slide deck so here it is.  Open Banking Strategy and Business Model from Chris Skinner And just in case it doesn’t make sense, here’s a video me presenting it. …

In a final write-up on leadership, there was a fantastic presentation about the lessons DNB had learned in trying to make digital change happen. Solveig Hellebust, Group Executive Vice President for People & Operations at DNB or, as she called it, POP, talked about the five things that make the difference. These are the lessons…

Another interesting factor in leadership is communication. When I ask people who they think are great leaders, they often name people like Steve Jobs, Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela, Winston Churchill and more. What is common in all of these names is that they are great orators. Their speeches are marked in history, and often cited…

I’m likely to be blogging about leadership all this week, as that was the theme du jour of our Nordic Finance Innovation meetings in Copenhagen and Oslo last week. Saxo Bank, DNB, Danske Bank, Nordea and more were discussing the challenges of digital transformation and the leadership challenge, and I’ve already started this series of…