Fintech

Continuing yesterday’s discussions about a big bank’s conference, I was intrigued at how often the subject of cryptocurrencies and bitcoin came up. But there again, it’s a topical thing at the moment with the price of bitcoins surging past the $4,000 mark and Goldman Sachs going against JP Morgan, and saying that they might even trade in…

I was at a large bank’s wealth management conference recently, where the CEO was being quizzed about various areas including a lot about technology and FinTech. He made several statements that I noted with interest: “Roboadvisory services improves our speed-to-market and human productivity, but does not replace humans. In particular, I can see that artificial…

It’s been an interesting few weeks, watching bitcoin’s rollercoaster ride as it rises to valuations over $4,000 and then dives to almost $2,000 before rising again to near $6,000. This is for an asset that just a year ago you could have purchased for a few hundred dollars. The rise of cryptocurrency valuations is confusing…

I’ve blogged on some of the themes I’m going to cover below, but the story gets clearer and clearer in my head the more I blog about and talk about it, so this version may be a little clearer than some that have gone before. The first is that banks organisational structures have to move…

I find it interesting as we move towards Open Banking and Open APIs through regulations at both the UK and EU levels. The push is for data sharing with trusted third parties with user consent. All well and good, you would think, but several surveys point to it not being quite so rosy. The typical…

I blogged about the FinTech themes that came out of the Celero conference the other day and forgot to mention that I recently joined a one-day retreat at Payments International in London, as a facilitator. I don’t do such intimate work very often, where I sit with a few people and jaw-jaw, but this was…

This quote If you’re getting something for free, you are the product has been floating around for a while, and normally is related to Facebook and Google. It’s all about the fact that these companies are selling you to advertisers as clickbait. Facebook, Google, Twitter and others are not free at all. You just think…

Following on from talking around the big ten tech themes last Friday, I thought I would follow up with five FinTech themes for right now.  This came out of a keynote speech I gave at Celero’s 9th annual technology conference in Canada last week. It was fun with the CEO, Bob Reczka, kicking off the whole…

I get lots of input from many sources, and one of the ones I like is the innovation survey of banking produced annually by EFMA with Accenture. It also usually proves to be one of the most read items on my blog – here’s the 2015 and 2016 reports – so, as I know you like it…

I’ve said continually that firms like Google and Amazon will never open a bank. I still believe that this will be the case – Facebook and Apple also fall into this view – and mainly hold this view because these companies would find full service banking a difficult and unprofitable space. In fact, I’ve blogged…