Digital Bank

Seven years ago, the first new retail bank in almost a century got its licence to open: Metro Bank.  Now, there are so many new banks starting up in Britain (and across Europe) that it’s sometimes hard to keep up with it all.  There are app-only start-up banks (Atom, Monzo, Starling, Tandem); foreign exchange payment cards (Revolut, SuperCard); personal…

I heard a rumour the other day.  The rumour goes something like: are you not surprised that banks grow into big beasts, as it’s government supported?  Governments want banks to be big and regulated, because governments can then access the data the bank is keeping about their clients.  IT’s access to data for tracking financial…

The first job Tom Blomfield (left in photo) ever had was delivering leaflets for estate agent Wilson Heal. He  lasted one day in the cold December rain before convincing the guys that leaflets were old school and they really needed a website, which Tom then built and still exists today. That opened up the world…

We are already entering the fourth-generation internet, the internet of things, but it won’t really take off until the next decade, the 2020s.  Sure, we have self-driving Teslas and Nest home appliances, along with Samsung’s Smart Things, but it’s not mainstream yet.  For example, none of my friends has a self-driving car yet. This will…

Now we move onto the third-generation internet, web 3.0.  What is web 3.0?  It’s not been well defined or described.  Many would say it’s the internet of things, but I disagree.  The internet of things is emerging, but it cannot exist until a bridge between the mobile social network and the internet of things has…

From the origins of the internet in 1990, the end of the 1990s saw the emergence of e-commerce and a plethora of payments services and commercial websites.  Then not a great deal happened until the internet became social.  Blog platforms like WordPress and Typepad emerged in 2003; Facebook launched in 2004; and YouTube a year…

For ten years, my friends cover at Z/Yen have been producing the Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI), on behalf of the City of London.  It’s a research program where people can answer the survey questionnaire and, from those participating, the different cities of the world vying to be financial hubs are ranked.  Around 2,500 people respond…

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…