Digital Bank

I was struck the other day by how many words are bandied about so much that they become meaningless. Then realised that many of these words fall into buckets. Then listed the buckets and they fell into two tribes: digital and analogue. The list is non-exhaustive and misses some bits …

As someone who has set up a number of small businesses, there are three major tasks that I hate: Doing the accounts Tax returns Invoices As the business owner, all I want to do is my job, to have fun, to get on with creating more customers and more business. …

I posted a joke the other day. The joke was that we had not ordered anything online yesterday, and our usual delivery guy called by today to check we were OK. The joke made me realise something. The realisation is that we really have pivoted from a world of stores …

I posted a joke the other day. The joke was that we had not ordered anything online yesterday, and our usual delivery guy called by today to check we were OK. The joke made me realise something. The realisation is that we really have pivoted from a world of stores …

I saw an interesting article about the Head of Technology at a major bank, let’s call it ABC Bank for the purposes of my column, and the article began by saying that this guy “commands a budget of $10 billion and a team of 40,000 technologists.” $10 billion is about half the …

There are five main themes driving where we are today and tomorrow: digital transformation; inequality and inclusion; having a clear purpose; stakeholder capitalism; and digital transparency. The network is connecting us all. This is a digital revolution. We are breaking from the past centuries of industrialising everything to the next …

With one of my financial providers I am an uber, super, mega, gold, wipe-my-ass, top tier client. They usually offer me champagne and free peanuts, and will go the extra mile to deal with me. Very nice (as Borat would say it). Thing is, I haven’t needed to call them …

I’ve claimed for some time that machines cannot do what humans do, because they have no heart. They purely do what we program them to do. True. Yet if you watch movies from Ex Machina to Terminator, machines can turn to do what they want to do once we’ve programmed …

I participated in a call the other day about financial inclusion and the moderator said that giving people banking was like giving a child the keys to your Ferrari. Without education, they would crash it so, rather than financial inclusion, you need inclusive finance. It was an interesting perspective, and …

I was thinking about run the bank, change the bank, and the challenges therein. Part of it was down to a conversation that repeats quite often about it being easier to launch a new bank than change the old bank. Something I’ve argued against regularly. Reason being: what are you doing …

I woke up and, as usual, checked the banking app for any updates or changes. There was a payment received.  Quite a major payment. It came from BIG NUTS ASS*. BIG NUTS ASS*? Who is BIG NUTS ASS*? I have no idea. I rang the bank. That took a long …

UPFRONT STATEMENT: I have crypto, but treat it as an experiment I attended an event in 2016 where Elon Musk was the star speaker. It was a good event, and he made sense. He doesn’t make sense anymore. Back then, I wondered if he was the 21st century’s real-life Tony …

I’m starting to worry about FinTech as they seem to have fallen foul of regulatory compliance and, as a consequence, customer trust. The biggest challenge for a challenger is to keep customer trust AND regulatory compliance. This is what we are seeing having consequences today. The fact I’m starting to …

Building on yesterday’s blog where I mentioned Monzo’s issues of client onboarding, I mentioned that, for the past few months, I’ve noticed many tweets from Monzo customers about accounts being closed suddenly, with no explanation. Each time, I’ve shared the information and copied Monzo and asked them to explain. Hey …

Investment banking, Corporate banking, Commercial banking, Private banking and Retail banking are all very different. Too often, commentators just talk about ‘banking’. It’s not all the same. In fact, an awful lot of retail banking is propped up by investment and commercial banking. That’s where the money is made. Banks …