There are a number of hotbeds for innovation in finance – London, Singapore, Tel Aviv, Silicon Valley – may all spring to mind to begin with … but what about Berlin and Munich? Yes, Berlin is showing some interesting true colours with three standout start-ups: Fidor, NUMBER26 and solaris. Two are full banks with banking…
I’ve talked about open sourcing banking and finance by converting everything to components (APIs) that can be plug and played into any front-end user experience (UX) through apps and devices, supported by data analytics, cloud and blockchain to reduce and automate the back office. All of this can be summed up as MoIP: the conversion…
I am surprised how many new start-up banks there are in Britain. My list so far includes physical distribution players such as: Santander (a challenger?) that moved to the UK in 2004 with the acquisition of Abbey Banco Sabadell’s acquisition of Lloyds spin-off TSB the soon-to-launch RBS spin off William & Glyn Vernon Hill’s Metro…
For the past year, there’s been lots of talk about Fintech Unicorns – start-up companies with over a billion dollar valuation launched since 2000. Jim Bruene at Finovate – register for Finovate Europe with 20% discount using FSClub20 – wrote about so many Fintech unicorns in July 2015, showing the list increasing four-fold in just a…
I had a really interesting evening this week, moderating an industry roundtable with panel participants including: Cliff Moyce, Strategic Adviser, DataArt Chris Barker, Managing Director, Global Head of Digital & Engineering Services, RBS, Mike Powell, Managing Director for enterprise capabilities, Financial & Risk, Thomson Reuters Scott Eblen, Chief Product Officer, Nutmeg Frank Neumann (COO, Quantstore)…
I had a really interesting conversation with Chris Barker, Head of Digital and Engineering for Royal Bank of Scotland. As usual, the conversation moved around data analytics, deep learning, artificial intelligence, building enterprise data systems, separating content from processing, re-platforming the back-end infrastructure and core systems and more. I’ll write more about that stuff tomorrow,…
In the 1970s, Walter Wriston, the then CEO and Chairman of Citibank, said that “information about money is becoming more important than money itself”. His successor, John Reed, said that “banking is just bits and bytes” in the 1980s. How right they were, and this just underscores how important digitalisation is to banking. We have…
I was honoured to be invited yesterday to address the European Banking Federation’s (EBF) annual conference in Brussels. There were many dignitaries there, as well as a number of senior Eurocrats, and so felt that my message of Fintech, Blockchain and Real-Time for Free might fall on resistant ears, but quite the opposite. I was…
