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Shaping the future of finance

Digital Bank

The branch of the future is NOT about advice

I regularly come back to the topic of bank branches, which are topical. A recent UK headline said that a town is now branchless … Closure of Lloyds leaves this Warwickshire town with no banks … whilst another says that the closing of branches is all about increasing profits for the banks … The cashless…

Some challenger banks are challenging

The UK’s challenger banks are busy getting on with it. They’ve got their licences, they’ve deployed their services, they’re partnering with third parties and creating marketplaces. Much of this was cited in a report by CBInsights, comparing the features of the five most notable new ones: Atom, Starling, Monzo, Revolut and Tandem. N26 were also…

The Pet Shop Boys said “Go West” … they got it wrong

I’ve been talking a lot about the Eastern and Southern Hemispheres these days. I’m adamant that these hemispheres are creating the future, whilst the North Western Hemisphere struggles with its legacy infrastructure. In particular, Europe and America are suffering from their old technology structures. Specifically, America is lagging the world. America. Land of the free…

The chasm between banks with digital leadership and those without

During #Money2020Europe Tink, the Swedish challenger bank, interviewed me on my opinions about all things finance and technology. It’s only five minutes and think it’s probably worth the viewing as people are picking up on various comments I made, such as: “The leadership team has to be completely committed to digital transformation as a structural…

As a bank fires its robot, will the robots fight back?

If you didn’t catch the big news of yesterday, it was the first public firing of a robot. In this case, a bank’s chatbot, Amelia. Amelia was launched last year by Swedish bank Nordnet, with the aim of speeding up customer onboarding and improving customer satisfaction. Apparently, she achieved neither and so was sacked for…

The battles for the future of fintech

Whilst in New Zealand, I had an interview with the country’s most respected business paper: National Business Review. The subsequent article is behind a paywall but, as they sent it across to me, I feel it’s worth sharing here. The battles for the future of fintech The future of financial services will be decided in…

Open Banking – a complete failure?

I found an interesting article about Open Banking the other day (via FinTech Insider News). Its title is: Open Banking in the UK; a disaster in the making? no wonder it intrigued me. However, I clicked the article open and the first paragraph read: When the CMA Order went live on 13/1/18, aside from the…

When the bank knows you’ve been hacked (before everyone else)

You may have seen that Ticketmaster just announced that thousands of customers worldwide may have been affected by a hack. If you didn’t here’s the low-down (via ABC News) The company said its British business, Ticketmaster UK, identified malicious software on a customer support product which was hosted by a third-party supplier Inbenta Technologies. Around…

What does the future bank look like?

I keep asking dumb questions like: if the tech giants give away payments, lending and credit for free, how will banks make money? As I’ve regularly blogged, the tech giants don’t want to get into banking per se, but they do want to encourage more traction through their platform by making buying and selling easier….

Banks are losing the data war

For some time now, I’ve been reflecting on a conversation about Monzo. It relates to my write-up the other day on new bank thinking, and that Monzo are clever with data. Using Google Map APIs and other services, they enrich my transaction statement so I know when, where and what I was doing when I…

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