Digital Bank

That old expression that what goes up must come down applies to so many things. An umbrella goes up and down, dependent upon the weather. Company executives who are going up will come down, most times. And businesses that appear to be bullet-proof can stumble and fall. I’m thinking Blockbuster, …

I’ve been isolating too much and watching too much TV. Binging on Netflix, Amazon Prime and such like, almost every film I watch seems to be the same. Good versus Evil and Order versus Chaos. Half of society seems determined to make everything sunny and bright; the other half seems …

For the last more than a decade, all I’ve ever heard bankers say is that bitcoin is a scam, a Ponzi scheme, purely useful for money launderers, paedophiles and terrorists. So, why are banks now offering bitcoin services? For me, this is one of the biggest questions, but the answer …

A final thought for the week on bank transformation. I often talk to banks. Some I’ve spoken to for decades. It shocks me that, after decades, they still have exactly the same issues. Fragmentation of data; an organisation built over decades with systems that are not integrated; data that is …

I see more and more stories about banks messing up customer accounts, system outages, data mismanagement, issues with technology and more. This is the one thing a bank cannot mess up. Airlines may mess up a booking; Amazon may mess up a delivery; BT or AT&T may mess up a …

After a year and a half, I presented my first keynote with a physical audience yesterday. It’s FinTech Week London! It’s a whole week, in London, talking about FinTech. That’s a surprise, huh? The interesting thing is that, after people have been locked up for a year, there was a …

I had a long drive last week and noticed five or six massive warehouses by the side of the motorway. It made me reflect on a new warehouse world. I’ve already lamented the loss of main street stores and likely end of malls but, equally, it’s interesting to consider this …

I grew up as an Englishman. Then I became British. Now, I’m a European. But then we had Brexit and all the other stuff. Yet now I live in Poland. I believe in a world of the future that has no borders, no flags, no barriers. Am I deluded? During …

I was imagining if I walked into a big bank job today. You are hired as CEO of Mega-Global-Bank PLC. What’s going on? Well, number one, no-one has any idea where the economy is going. There’s a global pandemic. Everything is up in the air, and we have lots of …

From July 12, I will be chairing FinTech Week London. It’s my first time leaving home since February 2020, and a major moment as it’s also the first physical conference on FinTech that I’ve seen so far (Money 2020 and more to come). FinTechWeek London takes place from July 12-16 …

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 …