Digital Bank

Just had a wonderful time in South Africa, a country I love to visit. Going between Johannesburg and Cape Town, there were many great meetings and networking opportunities, and it made me realise how vibrant the African fintech scene is after my recent visit to Cairo. Cape Town is particularly noteworthy as one of the…

Yesterday I talked about the difficulty of managing multiple financial accounts, and that we needed one account to rule them all. The problem with this is that you then have concentration risk, as one account if hacked would mean you would lose it all in seconds. So, what to do? The answer is one aggregated…

I was having a chat with some friends about the good old days, where everything was domestic and local. We had passbooks, cheques, cash and branches. Ah, those were the days. Life was simple, money was all in one place and easy to manage. Then the ATM came about and so we moved to cards…

I got into a new debate yesterday, talking with two guys who are formerly with big card companies (shush, you know who), and we started debating the four-pillar model that’s been around for the last half century. The model is the basis of the card industry and involves acquiring merchants, issuing cards through banks, and then…

I often come back to the trough of banking licenses, but if banks didn’t have banking licenses, why would we need them? A banking license is not just about compensation and insurance schemes, but about trust, trade, risk, regulation and returns. More than this, once a bank has a license it can lend, something an…

I was having a candid chat with a banking friend about life, the world and money, and he asked me a series of questions: How do we change culture to meet today’s fast-moving changes? How can we be more agile? How important are partnerships? Can we work with FinTechs? How will we work with them?…

I talk a lot about the platform economy where the network joins us all together. In that economy, like life on Earth, there are many players. 1000’s of companies, millions of people and billions of capital. The question is: how to connect them? The answer is to be a connector in the connected economy, and…

We all know the world is changing. Every day, we see things changing. The only constant is change. This makes the state we live in today very interesting. I can send a crypto payment from London to Nairobi instantly but, for various reasons, I cannot make a payment to my own account today. That is…

I recently wrote a white paper for XBP Europe, which you can download (see later). It’s all about how to be fit for the future and digital transformation, my usual subjects. Just to give a taste of the paper, here’s a small extract: The obvious answer is to digitise the corporation. The harder question is:…

Ever since Trov, the real-time insurance firm, appeared on the scene, I’ve been wondering what else could real-time finance do. If you are not aware, Trōv allows you to insure a smartphone or laptop or anything else you value for hours, even minutes. The company no longer exists – it was acquired by Travelers Insurance…