Digital Bank

I was chairing a conference on blockchain and distributed ledgers the other day. The audience were a mixture of start-ups and banks, and the speakers were talking about how they viewed the world of distributed ledger developments. Many of the banks had successfully complete proofs of concept projects and were now moving to pilots. It…

I’m making a presentation on cybersecurity this week at our Nordic Finance Innovation meetings. This meant preparing a few new slides from scratch as I don’t have a set deck for cybercrime, and sat and started ideas just as the news dropped about the Equifax breach. You’ll all know about this by now, but over…

I recently was interviewed for a conference in Miami, and thought you might enjoy the Q&A so sharing … Your book “Digital Bank” published in 2014 included extensive guidance and background on the digital revolution in banking that was taking place. Are changes going at the speed and in the direction you envisioned? Yes. I…

I now think I am a good friend of Pablo García Arabéhéty, CGAP’s Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean. This is, in part, because he’s contributed one of the key pieces I’m using in my new book Digital Human (due for release next Spring), and partly because we met at the CIAB conference last week,…

Before 2010, I was writing a lot about technology but it was all heavily geared towards regulations.  It was pretty dull, to be honest, but worthy.  MiFID and PSD were top of mind, along with Basel III and other global, European and domestic regulations.  I wrote a lot about regulations. Then it pivoted at the…

I just had a whirlwind visit to Indonesia to support DBS in the rollout of their digibank service there. It was a very short visit, but a packed evening of presentations and discussions. Part of the time was spent with Piyush Gupta, the CEO, who I’ve been watching for some time now. Piyush has surrounded…

A short time ago, I hosted an interesting group for the Nordic Finance Innovation meetings.  The meeting gathered several of the leading-edge Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) companies that have launched in the last few years including Bud, Clearbank, Leveris, Saxo Bank and Solaris.  Building on each others narrative it soon became clear that anyone could launch a…

I get press releases all the time and generally ignore them. In fact, I don’t know why they email me, as I never post them on the blog. Uh-oh. I just got one that I’m posting on the blog. Floodgates opening.   What will happen when Amazon opens a bank. It is not such a…

I was in a conversation with a bank executive talking about innovation.   We all know the Catch-22 in a bank: you want to be innovative, but only as long as there’s no risk but, with any innovation, there has to be risk.  You can play in the sandbox like little kids but, if you try…

I was talking with a few FinTech firms the other day. They are all fully licensed banks, and are less than 15 years old. They all seem to have one thing in common: refreshment. What I mean by this is that they talk about technology in a very different way to traditional banks.  Traditional banks,…