Digital Bank

I’m working on my next book already. Digital Human only came out a few months ago, and here I am off already on a new one. I’m not going to share too much about it yet, as it won’t come out for two years, except to give you some clues on its themes and content. The…

I’m often asked how I got into FinTech. It’s an interesting question as I’ve been involved in Finance and Technology all of my life. Back in the day, it wasn’t called FinTech. It wasn’t cool. It was just boring old tech in banking. Interestingly, for almost a quarter century, tech in banking was all about…

I talk about 1,000s of start-up companies doing one thing brilliantly well, and was looking for an anecdote that might help me talk about this better …. and found one. It goes like this: A ten-year-old boy decided to study judo, despite the fact that he had lost his left arm in a devastating car…

I sometimes write blog posts that I actually disagree with. I write it to provoke reactions, and to test my own thinking. As a result, I think I usually annoy people in banks who read my writing but, instead, I actually get a quite a lot of compliments, for testing bank thinking. That is why…

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…