Fintech

Global trade is breaking apart. The winners won’t be the ones who move. They’ll be the ones who connect. For years, the global trade conversation has been dominated by one question: where should we move our supply chains? China is risky, America is unpredictable, Europe is expensive and geopolitical tensions are making international commerce look…

We have spent the last few years obsessing over artificial intelligence that sits in front of the customer – chatbots that summarise documents, copilots that draft emails, and interfaces that appear to know everything. But finance does not run on language. It runs on transactions, cash flows, liquidity, risk and trust. After spending time examining…

Nubank wants to go global but not like Revolut. Everyone assumes Nubank wants to be like the next Revolut. They’re wrong. Revolut wants to build one financial superapp for the world. Nubank is building something different: a global banking empire that does not require Nubank to be the bank. That sounds like a subtle distinction,…

The interesting story is no longer simply whether bitcoin goes to $50,000, $100,000 or $500,000, but whether the technologies created around crypto are becoming the foundations of a new financial system. If that is right, it raises a much bigger question: what is the money in that system? For most of our lives, the answer…

I just did an interview with LVTX about the future of payments. Sharing it here, fyi: What is one of the biggest structural inefficiencies in the payments and financial services ecosystem that still hasn’t been solved? One of the biggest structural inefficiencies in financial services today isn’t payments or settlement. It’s digital trust. The fact…

You are reading this as your data is harvested. On average, your personal data is collected 271 times a day. I know who you are. I know what you are doing. I will look for you. I will find you. Most of us think surveillance involves CCTV cameras, governments, police databases and, perhaps, the slightly…

There are always two sides to a coin and, right now, the two sides of our technological future could hardly look more different. On the one side are the technologists who want us to build more, compute more, automate more and move faster. Artificial intelligence will transform everything, robots will do much of the work,…

I was playing around with some numbers the other day, comparing the world’s biggest banks with the world’s biggest fintech firms, when something struck me. We keep comparing them using all the obvious measures: customers, revenues, profits, assets and market capitalisation. Who’s bigger? Who’s growing faster? Are the fintechs really disrupting the banks or are…

I asked AI to summarise the latest edition of Huawei’s financial magazine called Transform, and this is what it came back with. I think AI is not objective … Transform Issue 27: Banking’s Butterfly Moment The most striking contribution in Huawei’s Transform Issue 27 comes from Chris Skinner, who argues that banking is moving beyond…

MasterCard just produced an interesting range of views about the future of shopping and money using visionaries like my friend Theo Lau, who alerted me to the report. Download the report here. A quick summary. We have spent the last years talking about artificial intelligence as though the big change is that we will have…