Digital Bank

I recently did a workshop with a major bank and asked them to send questions beforehand. This is a great way for me to develop a Q&A stream as they asked me lots of questions. The first big question was: What do banks need to do to be successful in the future? Well, if I…

For years, we have talked about digital identities and how to make them work. The fact is that most countries are lagging behind whilst a few are leading, such as India with Aadhaar. Where it is working, it is totally transformative. For example, India moved from only 35% of the population able to access bank…

There’s a quote I often use from John Oliver that cryptocurrency is “everything you don’t understand about money combined with everything you don’t understand about computers”. That was 2018. It’s now 2024, and things are a lot worse. I’ve blogged about the confusion of money recently, and it is not only the fragmentation of money…

There’s nothing more annoying than when you get that note saying that you have just been charged $149 to renew your annual subscription to Youreanidiot.com. I subscribe to lots of different things and often forget that I subscribed. Then you suddenly find that $100s are leaving your account each year on things you no longer…

I find it hard to believe that some commentators are still talking about BaaS and the great unbundling of banking. The reason? Well that was the conversation we were having fifteen years ago. Today, the discussion is much more around embedded banking that is intelligent, ubiquitous, everywhere, anywhere, anytime … except that I was having…

It’s interesting when we look at how AI is developing. First things first, AI is a large bucket of development. It’s not one thing. It’s so many things that are then applied to specific areas (I blogged about this the other day). So, it’s interesting reading various reports today about how AI is developing in…

You may have seen my shameless plug of the new book Intelligent Money: When Money Thinks For You … well, here’s another one. After a podcast with my friends in Finland, who quite like my thinking, Pål Krogdahl wrote up his thoughts on our chat on LinkedIn. I really enjoyed his summary, so here it is. Meanwhile, you can…

For years, I’ve said that Big Tech will crunch the periphery of finance – payments, cards, credit and such like – but will not try and dig into the core of deposit-taking banking because it’s too regulated and difficult. Instead, they are far more likely to partner with banks than do banking. That view still…

I’ve been talking about trust a lot lately, as that’s the basis of why you put money in a bank. You trust them. Why do you trust them? Well, it’s not because of their brand or their branch. It’s because they are licensed and promise to guarantee that they will not lose your money or,…

Everyone seems to be talking about CBDCs: Central Bank Digital Currencies. They are being launched to stem the tide of cryptocurrencies, but it makes you ask: what’s the difference. A CBDC is backed by a government; a cryptocurrency is backed by decentralised democracy. Not much difference there then. The Bank of England defines CBDC as…