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Fifteen years ago, I did a major survey into the use of cloud computing in financial services. Bear in mind this was really early days, and the results were quite nebulous. The main headline was that cloud computing needs better definition to succeed: The research report, which encompasses the views of over 230 financial professionals…

It seems like most of the news this week has been about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Between Donald Trump, a crypto convert, and Elon Musk, a crypto enthusiast, everyone is now getting in on the game. By way of example, here’s a few headlines in the past week: There’s another big winner of the US election:…

I was interested in this speech given the other day by Patrick T. Harker, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank, because its title was: Fintech, AI, and the Changing Financial Landscape The speech is broad, and focuses upon the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to the financial…

I stumbled across this clip the other day of Jeff Bezos on The Tonight Show twenty-five years ago. Jay Leno asks him how the company can be worth billions when it consistently makes losses. Jeff Bezos laughs along but then says: “we are a famously unprofitable company, but we are investing in the future”. We…

Unsurprisingly, after a major election that will influence the Western world, the election of Donald Trump resulted in a flood of PR releases and contacts to tell me how this will influence the economy, Europe and the world. Some even got more specific, talking about how it will change fintech and cryptocurrencies. Let’s take a…

Building on my blog the other day about BLIK (the Polish digital wallet), I just got two really insightful pieces of analysis on European payments – talking of a payments vision – from PWC in a report on Europe’s open banking vision and Jeremy Light, a good friend formerly of Accenture, on EU wallets. Here’s the…

At the end of the 1990s, a colleague of mine was sacked because he complemented a fellow female worker on how lovely her hair looked. I thought it was political correctness gone mad, but it’s even worse today. You feel you’re walking on egg shells all the time. For example, I got sacked for saying…

I just did a search for papers on digital transformation and was surprised that I got a whole load of results from every single tech company out there addressing the question: “what is digital transformation?” (a question I have blogged about a lot). As someone who has been doing this his whole life, my simple…

A year ago, a government commissioned report in the UK asked for a National Payments Vision and Strategy, or NPVS for short. Looking into this a year later, there does not seem to be much action. The report was produced by Joe Garner, founder of a start-up in the dot.com boom, a director at the…

I remember companies like Gartner and Forrester predicting that there would be a trillion dollar market in online sales by 2020 back in the 1990s. Now we are in 2024, it’s a three trillion dollar market, and so I thought it might be interesting to look at the various statistics being bandied about by firms…