Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

Fintech

Africa’s blockchain transformation

ValueWeb makes the contention that you cannot have an internet of things without a real-time and cheap internet of value.  A core part of this is focused upon building a cheap shared ledger structure for digital identity and digital currencies and guess what?  That cheap shared ledger is most likely going to be built in Africa. …

The African Mobile Revolution, Part One

Last week I chaired the inaugural Dot Finance Live conference in Nairobi, Kenya.  It is Africa’s premier FinTech event, drawing people from all over the countries of sub-Sahara Africa.  What struck me as I listened to lots of keynotes about mobile innovation and mobile financial inclusion, is that Africa is actually leading the world in…

Principles of The Reimagined Bank

So there are some clear lessons we can learn as base foundation principles when reimagining banking for the 21st century: Everything is peer-to-peer networked It’s all in real-time globally Commerce is not just person-to-person but more machine-to-machine We are looking at the exchange of value between machines and individuals, not just money Transactions are the…

Using intuitive interfaces for contextual commerce

As we start to reimagine the bank, it is obvious that focus on the platform design and user experience is key, as demonstrated by YouTube.  A second key factor is recognising that the world has changed thanks to the mobile network.  We probably go yea, yea, yea when we talk about mobile, as we’ve all…

Lessons banks can learn from YouTube (and others)

I need a little time to think about my reimagined financial structure, but some of the basics are already in play such as the idea of thinking about value exchange rather than monetary exchange.  Value exchange is based upon the ability to reach the world with a thought.  I do that every day via social…

Whatever next generation banking is … it won’t be banking

After writing about whether we are creating faster horses when we think of applying open sourced technologies to banking, some more thoughts occurred to me: Are we applying Blockchain to clearing and settlement, rather than reimagining the whole trade cycle from liquidity structures to collateral management using open source platform structures? Are we using data…

The new FinTech Bank

I launched ValueWeb in Singapore yesterday and my friend Vladislav Solodkiy, Managing Partner at FinTech VC Fund Life.SREDA, hosted the evening.  He was kind enough to share his speech with me, so I thought I’d copy it here and share with you.  Enjoy! From BaaS and neobanks to FINTECH-BANK Fintech is currently undergoing a natural evolution stage….

In the digital age, printed proof of identity is ludicrous

I remember being involved in a business process re-engineering project for an insurance firm some years ago.  We looked at how the underwriting process worked on complex insurance risks and discovered that in the middle of the process, the documentation would move to the overseas desk.  It would sit there for a day or two,…

Are banks really challenged by Fintech, or is this just more of the same?

I regularly attend conferences where several themes crop up around disruption – that word we hate – disintermediation, and the end of banking as we know it.  The problem is I’ve heard it for 30 years and it hasn’t happened … yet.  Will it?  Let’s have a look. The first theme is that banks are…

Open sourcing finance: you cannot delegate this project

Talking about transformation at conferences every day gets you into a mantra.  My mantra is leadership and how banks lack technological leadership.  The pushback is that you have too many technologists without banking knowledge.  We need banks run by people who understand money, and they can tell the technologists what to do. I’m not so…