Fintech

I never used the Apple wallet until recently. Reason being that I didn’t need to. Then the pandemic hit, and I wanted to avoid using cash, so all of my cards that would work with Apple loaded into the phone. Interestingly some cards would not load but hey, contactless and cardless is the way. Then…

I stumbled across an interesting white paper from Citi the other day saying that the metaverse is an $8 to $13 TRILLION opportunity: “The total addressable market for the Metaverse could be between $8 trillion and $13 trillion by 2030, with total Metaverse users numbering around five billion. But getting to that market level is…

I have spent time in Ukraine and Russia in the past, and live next to the borders (my base is Warsaw these days). It has been a challenging time and so I reached out to Rostyslav Dyuk … … Chairman of the Board at the Ukrainian Association of FinTech and Innovation Companies (UAFIC) to give…

I was reminded the other day of a quote by Ronald Reagan: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” He said this in the 1980s about the government’s view of the economy, but let’s apply it to cryptocurrencies. Initially irrelevant but now mainstream, many…

I’ve been looking at where we are in 2022, compared with 2012. In 2012, everyone was talking about FinTech disrupting and destroying the dinosaur banks; in 2022, banks are buying FinTechs and even launching their own start-up FinTechs Things have changed. I blogged a while ago about the phases of FinTech we’re going through, and can…

Back in 2015, I interviewed Nikolas Adalberth, a co-founder of Swedish FinTech unicorn Klarna. Little did I know back then that they would be of the biggest stars of FinTech and the creators of BNPL, the Buy Now Pay Later, revolution Is it a revolution? Not really. It’s just another form of credit, but people like…

If you didn’t read my blog last week asking whether the pandemic had transformed banking to be digital forever (answer: no), what is obvious is that the pandemic has changed consumer behaviours forever. This was brought home to me when reading the Forbes-Ipsos survey of American consumers views of digital banking. The survey took place in…

My newest book comes out in June. The theme is the integration of finance, technology and ESG. It’s a subject that has been in the ascendancy for years, but became in vogue in the late 2010s. Now it is a thing. I worry some will therefore think I only came to think about it in…

I’m not sure if anyone noticed but yesterday was the day that Europe voted not to ban bitcoin. It’s been bubbling for a while, as the EU developed a new Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) framework to protect EU citizens who invest in such assets. In many ways, it’s a good thing as, once a…

This BBC article … The remarkable items that have been used as currency … got me thinking about tokenisation. The article discusses the use of shells, specifically the seasnail shell called a cowrie, and how it became a global currency by around 1200BC. Although the cowrie is mainly found in the Indian and Pacific Oceans,…