Digital Bank

The financial marketplace is becoming incredibly diverse and niche. Instead of universal banks, we now have plug-and-play code. Some would call it an object-oriented market structure. The basics are that no one dominates this structure. Instead, there are boutique players at every level of the stratosphere. The universal provider is the one with the banking…

I was thinking about the day the old bank died, and thought the comment could be taken in a wider context: the day the old banks died. A lot of people want old banks to die, but they won’t. They’re the walking dead, in some cases, but there are also phoenix banks in other cases….

I’ve watched Marcus for a while and was not surprised to see its founder is leaving. There are those who are great at building companies and those who are great at running companies. They are rarely the same person. In fact, some of the greatest companies were created by builders and runners. Walt Disney is…

For years, people have argued that you need branches to serve customers for more complex transactions: to serve people who are uncomfortable with digital access; to serve young people getting their first mortgage; to serve retailers and small businesses with their cash needs; and so on and so forth. Baloney. To be honest, I’ve advocated…

Hmmm … the wonderful Anna Irrera posted an update on Reuters, stating that anyone can be a bank these days, along with her colleague Iain Withers. The article is about embedded finance, a term I dislike. I prefer invisible finance but hey, you win some, you lose some. The article notes that Accenture estimated in 2019…

I didn’t think I should share this, but I will. I ran over the dog. Like many other people during the pandemic, we were finally going to be stuck at home long enough to get a puppy. So, we got one. It made me realise that I’m a cat person. The dog was a pain….

One of the things over-looked by many is how banks invest in the Finverse. According to Toptal’s data, 63% of banks invest in startups or set up accelerators, and many are instrumental in FinTech companies’ operations, fund raising and IPOs. Bear in mind that start-ups need bank accounts too, which creates a multi-dependency in the…

Simon Taylor posted an interesting dialogue about BaaS the other day. He used a couple of charts to illustrate the banking stack. The easiest and most basic one is this: I quite like it but, as Simon himself notes, there’s lots of nuance missing here. So let me add my layer of nuance, and it’s the…

I recently spotted this post from Panagiotis Kriaris, who leads business development at Unzer: In the era of #APIs, #openbanking and #openfinance, banking has become a totally different game vs what it used to be calling for equally adapted business models. Let’s take a look at #businessbanking and at 4 potential #digital models for banks….

I just picked up Deloitte’s report on blockchain where 76% of finance executives have voted that digital currencies may overtake fiat currencies in the next decade*. Most of us would just read that statement and go meh. Not me. That’s a phantasmagorical statement. People in finance think fiat currencies are dead? What? If true, we…