Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

Fintech

How UK fintech can seize a £274 billion opportunity

As mentioned yesterday, I had the pleasure of moderating a fireside chat with Joanne (Jo) Dewar during IFGS last week. If you don’t know Jo, she’s a bit of a legend. You can find out all details here and, although she has achieved a lot in her career, her latest move is an interesting one:…

What happened at the Innovate Finance Global Summit?

I was at the Innovate Finance Global Summit last week and it was fantastic, as can be seen by the pic above of the CEO and Chair having a whale of a time on stage. The job I had to do was interview Jo Dewar on stage who just launched Project Nemo (more on that…

Am I financial marmite?

At a conference the other day, a banker came up to me and said “oh, you’re that fintech guy who throws rocks at us all the time”. A short while later, a fintech founder came up to me and said “oh, you’re the banking guy who thinks we will all fail”. Interestingly, a short time…

WTF … who the finanser are you?

The bank that wants to verify my identity but cannot accept the information … OMG, what’s going on? Under new UK government rules, there’s been a crackdown on money laundering and customer identity in the banking system. The response of the banks has been archaic to say the least. By way of example I blogged…

Stop talking about  “Open Banking”

Talking of sharing data, Salt Edge just sent me some interesting stats about Open Banking and Open Finance (there is a difference). They start by quoting that inconsistently reliable source Statista, who claim that the number of open banking users worldwide was expected to grow by an average of 50% per year between 2020 and…

Selling customer data – good or bad idea?

Be careful with data Many years ago a few banks debated the idea of selling customer data to get a payback. It was the wrong decision – if you sell customer data, it should the customer who gets the payback, not the bank – and they failed. The two specific examples I remember are Barclays…

Some big questions about the future answered

In discussion with a client the other day, we got into a debate about how to structure the next workshop with management. The result is that there were five critical questions proposed: How far can we automate everything? How can we use technology differently? Can regulators keep up with these changes? Could the network run…

It’s us and them

It’s interesting how people interpret things. Many think it’s old banks versus new banks; branch versus app; physical versus digital; government currencies versus cryptocurrencies; and more. For me, it’s not versus though. It’s and. We live in a world of transition where new and old banks work together well. My old bank does my boring…