Digital Bank

When I was a lad – a good start for any commentary – we didn’t know nothing about money. I got pocket money from my dad but, if I begged hard enough and long enough, my dad would relent and buy me that Batman Corgi car I had been lusting after. At school, they taught…

It’s interesting how trends rise. Over the past few years, I’ve been writing a lot about the impact of ESG and AI on banking, so it intrigued me to see a new survey of over 300 bankers about what’s new in banking. Key findings of the report include: Emerging innovations such as AI are cited as…

I was asking the other day whether it is better or worse that my children play video games rather than watch movies, and the reaction was: time moves on. It surely does. The gaming industry is now bigger than Hollywood and music combined, so what do I know? According to a report by SuperData Research,…

A few people got excited about the news this week that Mercedes-Benz had launched in-car fingerprint payments in partnership with Mastercard. I didn’t. In fact, it still amazes me how little we have developed since my days at NCR, then owned by AT&T. This was the 1990s and AT&T had this fantastic set of adverts…

I was intrigued by a new report from the IMF (International Monetary Fund) which states that: “if the use of fintech grows rapidly outside of the regulated sector, it can generate risks to market conduct and integrity”. Shock, horror! And so? “New fintech developments might quickly become systemic due to network effects (for example, when…

It made me laugh. Someone posed the question: what is the hiring process for fintech? After a short thought, my reply was to ask the candidate four questions: What do you think about banks? Define Python for me. Why did Schrodinger have a cat? Pork bellies or Orange juice? They are probably too cryptic for…

I just got a copy of Gartner’s emerging risks report for the second quarter 2023. A summary of the report is below but, before you read that, the charts speak volumes. First, we talk about PEST – Political, Economic, Social, Technological – forces for change. Right now, unsurprisingly, most change forces are based upon economic…

When Open Banking launched in the UK, it got a drubbing from the media (I blogged about it). The issue is that the media and banks believe that sharing your financial data will compromise your security. That attitude still persists today, which is why Open Banking hasn’t really taken off. By way of example, five years…

Every day I am finding security on my banking transactions more and more annoying. The reason? I have to confirm via a secondary approval the transaction; I then have to confirm the secondary approval with the vendor with a further secondary approval with the financial provider; I then have to process a further approval through…

There are several regular discussions in finance that come and go on a perennial basis. The idea that everything will become cashless and branchless is one of the main ones, but is that real? It seems to be if you believe what you read but, under the hood, there are some interesting developments. For example,…