I received a really interesting report from the law firm DLA Piper last week. The report is focused upon how blockchain is changing the financial services markets around the world, with the aim of establishing the position of major financial institutions with regards to cryptocurrencies and the use of blockchain in their daily operations. The…
I recently did an interview with my American friend Jim Marous over on The Financial Brand. It’s a good interview so I thought I would post my answers here. Feel free to comment! Your newest book, Digital Human, is obviously an outgrowth from your two previous books, ValueWeb and Digital Bank. What is the biggest…
I enjoyed the LendIt conference in Shanghai, and wrote a few notes. In particular, I enjoyed hearing the story of XWBank as told by Jiang Hai, the Vice Chairman. His presentation was in Chinese but, from the simultaneous translation and slides, I picked up some interesting stats. To begin with, I woke up because the…
I recently blogged about JP Morgan Chase spending $10 billion a year on technology of which $3 billion goes into new projects. There were then several other announcements that caught my attention about Citibank and Bank of America investing similar amounts in digital. The question it prompted is: why are you spending $3,000,000,000 on new…
There’s been an interesting but hidden trend taking place. It started in China with Tencent and Alipay and has now gone global. The phenomenon is called QR codes. QR, or Quick Response if you prefer the longer form, is a code that originated in Japan in the 1990s, and has gradually grown from a system…
I was having a debate about innovation with a friend. They said that most of what banks were calling innovation is actually business optimisation or, as I call it, incremental improvements. Incremental improvements are doing existing processes cheaper and faster, more effectively and more efficiently, with change. Easy areas to see how this can be…
I’ve been thinking for a while now about building a new financial system from the ground up using AI, blockchain, the Internet of Everything and other technologies. What would it look like? What would we build? I guess the piece that inspired a lot of my thinking came from two sources: Alipay (as usual) and…
The World Economic Forum has been conducting research over the last year around how AI (Artificial Intelligence) will change banking that was published last week. Here’s the lowdown: Artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the physics of financial services. It is weakening the bonds that have held together the component parts of incumbent financial institutions, opening…
I haven’t written about blockchain for a while. I guess it’s because I got bored of it. I’m not bored of the promise of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. Just bored of how much hype there has been and of so many companies claiming to have the latest blockchain breakthrough. However, when I saw this…
