I enjoyed the LendIt conference in Shanghai, and wrote a few notes. In particular, I enjoyed hearing the story of XWBank as told by Jiang Hai, the Vice Chairman. His presentation was in Chinese but, from the simultaneous translation and slides, I picked up some interesting stats. To begin with, I woke up because the…
I recently blogged about JP Morgan Chase spending $10 billion a year on technology of which $3 billion goes into new projects. There were then several other announcements that caught my attention about Citibank and Bank of America investing similar amounts in digital. The question it prompted is: why are you spending $3,000,000,000 on new…
There’s been an interesting but hidden trend taking place. It started in China with Tencent and Alipay and has now gone global. The phenomenon is called QR codes. QR, or Quick Response if you prefer the longer form, is a code that originated in Japan in the 1990s, and has gradually grown from a system…
I got into an argument after a presentation where I said that active fund management is dead. It wasn’t the best thing to say in front of a group of active fund managers, but I can’t help myself. It’s my background in dealing with program trading in the 1990s; then algorithmic trading in the 2000s;…
I’ve been thinking for a while now about building a new financial system from the ground up using AI, blockchain, the Internet of Everything and other technologies. What would it look like? What would we build? I guess the piece that inspired a lot of my thinking came from two sources: Alipay (as usual) and…
I haven’t written about blockchain for a while. I guess it’s because I got bored of it. I’m not bored of the promise of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. Just bored of how much hype there has been and of so many companies claiming to have the latest blockchain breakthrough. However, when I saw this…
I’ve spotted a couple of interesting discussions about millennials and money in the last week, both of which say that the views on them are wrong. Stereotyped as avocado-crunching, cappuccino drinking, needies, the general media view is that this is a generation spoilt by helicopter parents to grow up to be the most earnest losers…
I spotted a chart the other day showing the millions of dollars lost on cryptocurrency platforms … Source: The Wall Street Journal Since 2011, there have been 56 cyberattacks directed at cryptocurrency exchanges, initial coin offerings and other digital-currency platforms around the world, according to Autonomous Research, bringing the total of hacking-related losses to $1.63…
I cannot post a 222-page PDF from the US Government on FinTech and competition without also posting a 136-page PDF from the European Parliament on FinTech and competition. Also released last week, this is a report prepared by the policy department of the European Parliament at the request of the ECON Committee. The EU document has a…
