Fintech

For quite a while, I have been amazed by China’s innovations in fintech from Ant to WeBank. My first visit to a Chinese bank in the 1990s, they were using Abacuses to calculate transactions; now they use rocket science in the form of AI. A lot of this was covered in depth in the deep…

Dealing with financial abuse It only came to my attention recently in talking about these things with those trying to solve the issues is that financial abuse is as prominent as domestic abuse. If you beat up your partner, you can see the physical bruises; but what about if you coercively control your partner or…

The internet was launched in the 1990s based upon generations of technologies that went before. It was designed for the exchange of information, not value. Now, we live in a networked world of information and value exchange, and are trying to retrofit the mechanisms for commerce to a flawed structure. That is why we are…

Revolut just dropped their annual report and the numbers are simply stunning. In 2024, Revolut processed over £1 trillion in transaction volume, a 52% jump from the previous year, and customer deposits grew to £30 billion. Extraordinary fact: Revolut now serves more customers than HSBC! The question I hear you ask is: why? Why are…

I’m listening to a fascinating podcast from the BBC about Whisky Bandits. The scam is that you buy a cask of whisky for thousands of dollars, but the cask you bought does not exist. In other words, you just got a piece of paper saying that you own a cask or, in simpler terms, you…

In a disturbing new development using AI, I can generate a fake passport in minutes that would fool Revolut and Binance for account opening. This was a discovery by Polish researcher Borys Musielak using ChatGPT-4o, who created a fake passport in five minutes You can now generate fake passports with GPT-4o. It took me 5…

Back in the day, Brett King had this idea of starting a mobile-first bank. It was when Bank 2.0 took off, and I was one of the first investors. We ended up enjoying a day of brainstorming in an American park retreat, and developed the line “spend, save, and live smarter”, which is still there…

Well, not exactly digital but electrical. We saw the massive issue that created at Heathrow airport recently, but I’ve been personally affected by the same issue. Long story short, we have an electric gate at our property, and the electrics keep breaking down. Result? We are either locked in or locked out of our property….

In my presentations these days are five key themes: the fintech revolution; cryptocurrency creation; distributed ledger technology; the AI world; and quantum disruption. I could add to the list – the metaverse, 6G+, robots, etc – but these are the top five in the financial world I live in. Then, when you sit back and…

I was talking to a wealth management startup the other day, and they showed me an aggregation service that can harvest all of your physical, digital and emotional assets, combined with a death management service that alerts your key people to all the things they need to know to find those assets when you die….