Digital Bank

Banks are scared.  They’ve seen the rise of the new world of open APIs, apps and analytics and know that their organisations are not yet ready or fit to change to that world.  What to do? Well, the easiest thing to do is to block access to the bank’s data.  If third party FinTech firms…

I realised the other day that I didn’t have a good slide comparing the old bank world with the new.  I often refer to it with the line that banks were built in the last century for the physical distribution of money as paper in branches with buildings and humans; now they have to be…

I write so much that I sometimes forget what I’ve written, where.  For example, Mark Sievert of Silicon Valley Bank made an interesting comment on my predictions for 2017: Happy New Year Chris! One topic I am not hearing much about is the OCC December decision to offer Federal Charters to Fintech firms. http://bit.ly/OCCFintech. Many…

I seem to find most of the truly exciting stories these days are happening in unexpected places.  Tanzania, Indonesia, Turkey, China, Brazil … and specifically India. I wrote a fair bit about the demonetisation program in India at the beginning of December, saying that it’s a laudable objective but a flawed one, as 95% of the…

I’ve been talking a lot about open sourcing financial services this year and, more recently, tracking Open Banking.   The Open Banking Working Group was launched just over a year by HM Treasury to create an Open Banking Standard.  The standard is meant to guide how open banking data should be created, shared and used by its owners and those…

Building on yesterday’s news, the consumer research organisation Which? just released a report with a whole bunch of stats on UK bank branch closures.  Over 1,000 branches have closed in the last two years, with HSBC being most aggressive, shutting over 27% of their network. Source: BBC A total of 1,046 branches – equivalent to…

I was pointed to this article in the weekend’s Daily Wail by the one and only Duena Blomstrom, and it makes for great reading.  It’s all about the death squeals of consumers and journalists as they see the last bank in the village leave.  Here’s the list of HSBC bank branch closures this year alone: What…

I’m relaxing and thinking.  A bad combination.  Just had several sessions with different conferences on Brexit, Open API’s, PSD2, Open Sourcing, Open Banking, Innovation and more … and it all seems like such drivel.  One of the sessions was asking the question: is it time to drop the curtain on innovation theatre?  Yes, for gawds…

I was intrigued by a comment made by Anne Boden, founder of Starling Bank, on a panel I chaired the other day.  Anne used to work for ABN Amro, AIB and RBS, and is now a Fintech start-up and her comment went along the lines of: “I’ve now realised that the simple changes I needed…

I’ve recently been wowed by series such as House of Cards (Netflix) and The Man in the High Castle (Amazon), and am really blown away by The Crown (Netflix) and The Grand Tour (Amazon).   I’m blown away not because these are good internet shows, which they are, but by the budgets being spent on them….