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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…

Thinking about the Big Tech firms, most of them are enabling commerce. Amazon and Apple are building specific structures to make buying and selling easy. But one company is enabling fraud, scams and criminal activities. Meta. Meta runs Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as many other ventures from augmented reality to their X-like idea…

I just stumbled across a leap in the world. Cordless charging. Forget your cables, everything is now just charged through the air or by putting something onto a wireless charging point. It’s called induction charging and you’ve probably already used it. You put your phone down on a mouse-mat sort of base, and it starts…

My family has just been through a hard time. Mother, mum, is old and losing her faculties. My brother is her full-time carer and recently organised the sale of her house. Funds were finally transferred into her bank account, and that’s where the trouble started. My brother isn’t young and, in the spirit of trying…