Fintech

A couple of things hit my radar late last week. The first was a prediction by Bain & Co that challenger banks would own a third of the UK banking market by 2030. This coincided with the news of Revolut finally getting their UK banking licence. It’s only taken five years. Let’s dive in. The…

The next era of payments: when money moves at internet speed I just found an interesting report by KPMG about a new payment standard called x402. Have you heard of it? If you haven’t, it’s built to ensure open, free, frictionless payments, and could be revolutionary for embedded, invisible finance. Built by Coinbase, the x402 protocol…

Innovation vs Illicit Finance: Why the Future of Crypto Compliance is Intelligent The US Treasury just produced an interesting document about digital assets, innovation and criminal activity. It’s well worht a read, so download the report here … but, if you can’t be bothered, here is my view. There is a familiar pattern whenever a new…

I probably shouldn’t say this so, if I get arrested, please send money and help me but, over ten years ago, I told Russian and Iranian contacts to put all their money into bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to avoid sanctions. Yes, it’s my fault. I’m sure there are others out there, but the key thing about…

I just did a webinar sponsored by Xpand IT. Here is a summary: From Physical to Digital to Intelligent: The Third Revolution of Finance Let me start with a simple question. How many of you think we’re living through a period of unprecedented change in finance? We’re not living through change. We’re living through a…

I had a lovely deep-dive conversation with Martin Hargreaves, Chief Product Officer at Quant, during our webinar about how programmable money and liquidity are transforming corporate treasury and financial infrastructure. Martin gave me a great definition: “Programmable money is money that responds to external events and conditions while preserving its fundamental nature. The money itself…

  There’s been a lot of talk this week about JPMorgan spending $20 billion on technology in 2026. It sounds huge, and it is, and it’s slightly more than their peer group spend but, bear in mind, this is a bank worth over $800 billion and with revenues of $185 billion, so you need to…

Two headlines really struck me this morning. The first is that Stripe is now valued at over $150 billion – I’ve been following Stripe’s valuations for over a decade (it was just over $9 billion in 2016) … … and the second is that they are thinking about buying PayPal, which would be immense imho….

Returning to the branch discussions, I picked up on Jim Marous’s recent podcast with Bank of America  (BoA) which is headlined: BofA is Building 150 New Financial Centres at $5 Million Each. Here’s Why The podcast focuses on the fact that BoA is opening new branches focused upon advisory services having almost halved its branch…