Digital Bank

It shows the nature of money and finance in our lives, in the way that the media reports about it. Quite often you get a scary headline like the big banks are watching you or banks will sell your data and it makes us mad. Replace bank with internet giants, and it’s not so annoying…

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…

I keep thinking about the future internet and the ideal of creating a network where no one controls anything. It may sound silly, but it is developing already. In fact, in HBO’s excellent series Silicon Valley, the guys at Pied Piper recently did a pivot to try to create exactly this. The start-up gang are…

Now I didn’t make this statement, to be clear. A banker did. He was talking about the four quadrants of service, and said that banking needed to become like the sewage system: invisible, but incredibly important that it works especially when it’s urgent. I liked his ideas, and he presented it like this. Banking today…

The USA is a little bit confusing. On the one hand, they have some of the fittest people in the world; on the other, they have some of the fattest. On the one hand, they’ve championed the banning of cigarettes far more than any other nation and were the first to do it; on the…

After my recent blog about challenger banks, I received an interesting email from David Parker challenging the idea that a start-up is actually a challenger. Chris I continually argue that Revolut is not a challenger bank – it does not today have a banking licence. If you want to say any prepaid card is a challenger bank…

A few years ago Jamie Dimon was renowned for saying that bitcoin developers “are going to try and eat our lunch” and that silicon valley was coming to get the banks. Three years later, it’s not quite the case. The big banks are getting bigger, and the FinTech community is nibbling at the ankles and not…

BACS released UK account switching statistics this week, and it makes for interesting reading. The big winners in the first quarter of 2018 are Halifax, Nationwide and HSBC. The big losers are Co-operative Bank, Lloyds and Barclays. Why? Well, Halifax offers a great incentive to switch: £75 … nothing like a bribe is there? Nationwide…