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Shaping the future of finance

Fintech

For every success, there are many failures #Varo

We all revel in the buoyance of fintechs succeeding. What about those who fail? Notable fintech failures include BlockFi: A crypto lending and exchange company that collapsed during the 2022 crypto crisis, partly due to its relationship with FTX (FTX was a fintech failure as was MtGox). Then there are companies like Fast, a one-click checkout company…

Will Sophia replace me?

I asked AI to tell me about the future of banking the other day. It responded with a great set of answers: The future of banking is being reshaped by technology, shifting customer expectations, and new regulatory and economic realities. Here are the key trends that will define the next 5–10 years: 💡 1. Banking…

PNBL or BNPL?

My friend Ron Shevlin was putting some shade on Starbucks app this week. The reason is that some claim Starbucks is a bank because their prepaid app is so popular. Ron claims it is just PNBL – Pay Now, Buy Later – and is nothing to do with being a bank. The thing about his view…

The next wave of tech change

I just got a whole new set of tech phrases from a Gartner report. Giving my interpretation, here we go: Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS) is a proposed framework for Device Direct connectivity using satellite and cellular communication combination. The framework enables partnership between satellite (specifically low Earth orbit [LEO]) providers and terrestrial mobile operators…

UK Gov needs to bring back the Fintech mojo

Giving away one of my trade secrets, I asked ChatGPT to give me suggestions about what to blog about and it came up with seven things: 🚀 1. The Rise of Embedded Finance 2.0 How non-financial platforms are evolving from offering simple payments to full financial ecosystems (e.g., credit, insurance, and investments built into SaaS,…

Trainers, explainers and sustainers – mortgages by machines, part two

After my blog yesterday about mortgage by machines, I left out one key component: humans. You have to remember that machines don’t think, they only appear to think because we develop them that way. Sure, there may be sentient machines at some point in the future when we get to the great Singularity but, until…

Is an Islamic loan a loan or a borrowing?

I’m about to have a week in Kuala Lumpur, if anyone wants to meet-up, with a focus on Islamic Finance. I remember twenty years ago talking with Mike Hanlon who was founding the Islamic Bank of Britain (IBB), and he was telling me how UK Gov really did not understand the concept. What is the…

The UK government’s digital identity scheme arrives, dead on arrival

It was interesting that the Labour Party Annual Conference in Liverpool last week did not talk about digital identity schemes. This is the party in government who, days before the conference started, announced that all people who wanted to work in Britain would need a digital ID in their government app. Like the National Insurance…

Key take-away from #SIBOS 2025: it’s no longer banking and payments

Watching Sibos from afar – I haven’t been invited for a while due to being too provocative – I was not surprised to see that Quantum computing, AI, CBDCs, stablecoins, tokenization and blockchain are all making the headlines, as these are all the themes I spend my time presenting about around the world. Cybersecurity, AI…

How much is Harry Kane’s toe worth?

I’ve just created a platform to tokenize idols. Any idol and even bits and pieces related to them. You can tokenize Taylor Swift’s underwear; tokenize Rory McIlroy’s golfing glove; tokenize Ryan Reynolds Wrexham shirt; or even tokenize Harry Kane’s big toe. After all, any part of an idol is worth something to a fan, so…

Chris Skinner Keynote, April 2025, Europe

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