Fintech

Something interesting is happening in fintech, and I think we may need to stop talking about fintech as though it is an industry sitting somewhere alongside banking. For most of the past twenty years, that distinction made sense because there were banks and there were fintech companies trying to disrupt particular parts of what banks…

For years, banks have worried about technology companies eating their lunch. Fintech would destroy banking. BigTech would become banking. Digital wallets would disintermediate banks. Cryptocurrencies would replace banks. Stablecoins would replace deposits. Decentralised finance would replace everything. None of that quite happened. Now we have artificial intelligence and, this time, there may be a very…

For decades, the architecture of money was reasonably easy to understand. Banks held the money, central banks sat at the heart of national monetary systems, card networks connected merchants and consumers, and SWIFT connected banks across borders. It was complicated behind the scenes, but the basic structure had been remarkably stable for years. Then the…

Corporate treasuries face a silent crisis that is changing how they hold cash. Holding massive reserves in local fiat bank accounts was once safe. But high inflation and currency fluctuations make idle cash a financial liability. This creates several challenges for mid-tier corporate treasuries, requiring modern solutions. The Modern Corporate Treasury Crisis Historically, only massive…

Warren Buffett observed years ago that every market eventually sorts itself into three groups: innovators, imitators and idiots. It is deliberately unfair but, like most good aphorisms, it contains more than a grain of truth. The innovators invent something genuinely new. The imitators wait until the innovators have proved there is money to be made and…

I recently asked a simple question on LinkedIn. Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter, has X become less useful? The responses were fascinating, not because everyone agreed, but because almost nobody talked about the technology. Instead, they talked about how the platform made them feel. One person wrote that they had built their career on…

You’ve been thinking about cryptocurrencies all wrong. Every few months someone declares that cryptocurrency is dead. In fact, there’s a website dedicated to recording every one of those predictions. The latest panic is bitcoin’s price falling below $65,000 and Coinbase reporting weaker revenues. A few months earlier everyone was predicting Bitcoin would hit $200,000. Before…

Back in 2021, PayPal was worth around $360 billion. Today it is worth closer to $50 billion. That’s one of the biggest destructions of market value we’ve seen in fintech, and yet it isn’t because the company stopped growing. Quite the opposite. PayPal still moves almost $2 trillion every year, serves around 440 million active…

One person in seven has no access to formal financial services. One person in six lives with a disability. We normally think of these as two separate inclusion challenges. They are not. They are the same problem. Financial systems were designed around a single type of customer, leaving millions of others behind. For decades, financial…

For centuries, we’ve designed the world for the able-bodied and called everyone else disabled. Today, technology is quietly rewriting those rules. It is making finance, communication, work and everyday life adapt to people, rather than forcing people to adapt to systems. Increasingly, I think disability tells us less about the individual than it does about…