I’ve written a lot about Alibaba, Ant Financial and Alipay. This is not because I endorse or want to advertise the company, but because they are the first company to have embarked on a global financial inclusion strategy and have been marking it happen. Ant Financial is now some of the technology power behind PayTM…
I’m having lots of discussions about tokenisation and cryptocurrencies, and it often boils down to hashing the data. Hashing data is taking the source information which may be your account details or card information and shortening it into a machine-readable link that doesn’t share the original data. It’s a little like when I tweet a…
I recently wrote an article for Bloomberg’s Business Week, and thought it worth sharing with y’all here: What’s next for blockchain? Everyone got very excited a few years ago about blockchain technologies, the ledger system that was spawned by the arrival of bitcoin in 2009. It allows the recording of transactions to be automated and…
I shared this list of banks that are supposedly the most digital of the large players on twitter the other day: Banco Santander Bank of America Barclays BBVA BNP Paribas Citi DBS Bank Deutsche Bank HSBC JP Morgan Chase RBS Société Générale UniCredit Wells Fargo People came at me, stating that it was a biased…
As mentioned yesterday, I always get a new take on life when I come to Africa, and this visit is no exception. I’m chairing conferences where a range of start-ups, telco’s and banks are talking about their experiences and views. Halfway through the dialogue, a lightning bolt cracked through my forehead. Not literally obviously, that…
In my blog yesterday, I talked about the technology titans being liked and potentially trusted with money, but I still don’t think they will open full-service banking. Instead, I think they will focus upon full-service information. The reason I say this is that they don’t want to be banks, it is not core, but they…
I recently blogged about the Edelman Trust Barometer, which makes clear that technology firms are trusted the most and financial firms the least. This is misguided however, as we need to think about who trusts them with what. Consumers trust technology firms not to abuse their data? Hmmm. Consumers trust technology firms to be truthful? Hmmm….
I spotted two stories about BBVA that appeared yesterday. The first was in the Financial Times with BBVA Chairman Francisco Gonzalez asking the G20 to take action against the big internet firms, saying “authorities [need] to bring order to this massive change” that could “pose risks to financial stability”. He warns that groups such as…
I was intrigued to see the latest account switching numbers for the UK. Switching has been a focus of the Competition & Markets Authority, regulators, government and more, and yet promoting people to switch is not working. According to the latest stats, there are around 70 million deposit accounts across the UK, with the average citizen…
I’ve talked a lot about how young visionaries are re-shaping the financial industry. John Collison was 19 when he founded Stripe with his brother Patrick, and Ollie Purdue was 21 when he dropped out of university to found neobank Loot. In fact, there are many innovators under 30 out there, as highlighted last week by Forbes…
