Fintech

It’s interesting times when regulators seem to regularly clamp down on fintech firms that are out of the starting gate. The biggest area they are trying to grapple with is cryptocurrencies, obviously, but they seem to be failing there: The rise and continuing fall of Sam Bankman-Fried: A step-by-step guide to his case so far…

It’s coming. It’s been talked about for years. It’s finally here. Tokens. Physical and digital assets are being tokenized. In fact, maybe your DNA has been tokenized. Soon, everything will be tokenized. We talked about this years ago, but it’s notable that VISA, SWIFT, BNY Mellon and JP Morgan are now tokenizing. In a number…

I bumped into an interesting online debate the other day, that started with Brian Armstrong, the CEO and founder of Coinbase, who always has something worthwhile to say. His opening line on a recent Coinbase blog is a good example: Coinbase is working to update the financial system that was built over 100 years ago by enabling…

Times change. We can see that from the massive success of some firms, like NuBank, that there is good news out there in some parts of the world. Having said that, 2023 seems to be blighted by an awful lot of bad news. A company regularly picked over by the media is the massive failure…

We’ve talked for years about the need for micropayments. I can remember in the 1990s that the pay-per-view model demanded a payment for a single piece of information. Why should I subscribe for $30 a month to a website where one article has become relevant? Surely, I could pay $0.50 cents to read that one…

Brazil’s FinTech giant Nubank just crushed its 2Q 2023 earnings. We have never seen growth like NU’s in any challenger bank. In fact, some would claim – including me – that this ten-year-old company is not only the strongest neobank in the world, but one of the best-run digital banks ever, maintaining solid profitability. Here…

Building on yesterday’s idea of the future world, where our brains are connected 24*7 in real-time to the network, what would that mean for financial services? Well, I’ve blogged about this a few times already: Invisible banking is the place to be Nobody wants embedded finance Specifically, if we think of money as part of…

Apple rules the world. Assailed by Google/Alphabet, Facebook/Meta, Samsung and more, Apple has sustained an incredible trajectory to become a three-trillion-dollar company. Apple is now worth more than the entire FTSE100 list of companies … In terms of competitors, only Microsoft comes close which, some say, is mainly due to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but Apple’s dominance is…

I’ve been writing about the war on cash for years. It’s a constant theme that comes up at conferences like SIBOS, and the first time I think I heard the phrase was a Visa presentation back in the 2000s. Back in 2012, I wrote about a Pew report that surveyed a range of experts about mobile…

Always a controversial figure, Anne Boden has hit the headlines again after stepping down as CEO of Starling Bank. Her announcement of remaining on the Board but no longer being the leader of the bank was originally made in May: Boden, who owns 4.9 per cent of the bank she founded in 2014, said she…