Fintech

I bet you were wondering why I hadn’t written an Ant update recently. Well, I thought it was getting too much … but then I just arrived in Hong Kong and the hotel has kindly given me a copy of Fortune magazine with the headline cover page talking about the battle between Alibaba and Tencent….

There’s lots of friction around these days.  Banks that get digital and banks that don’t; fintechs that want to change everything and fintechs that don’t; digital currencies to replace fiat currencies and fiat currencies that are going digital; destruction, disruption and disappointment; and more. It just shows the world of massive change we are going…

It’s interesting to hear bank CEOs talking about the threat of technology to their business, and the fact that more and more CEOs are talking about it. Jamie Dimon and Francisco Gonzalez of JPMorgan and BBVA were the first to start the call to action five years ago. Jamie talked about Silicon Valley eating the…

I got called out in one review of my new book Digital Human calling it a “futurist’s wet dream”, which I thought was a bit much. The reviewer doesn’t work in finance, didn’t like my views on science fiction becoming science fact, didn’t buy into the revolutions of humanity and felt the book was confused….

My second and last day at Money2020 Europe was packed with networking, meetings, panel discussions, private events and more. Throughout the day, the themes of the first day kept bubbling over. I guess it was typified with the comment that the CEO of TransferWise announced how happy they are to be partnering with banks. This,…

The good thing about blogging is that I have a public record of my thinking. Hence, I can claim that Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) is mine. That’s because I was presenting the idea ten years ago and blogged about it in February 2009. Now, no idea is unique, and the BaaS idea was purely based upon the…

I’ve got caught in a few discussions recently with people who tell me Ant Financial are Chinese. They’re not. Neither is Alibaba and, if you think they’re just Chinese, you’re going to miss a huge change in the next decade. Ant Financial is an open marketplace of apps, APIs and analytics, that I’ve been describing…

For those who know me they know that I travel a lot and, in those travels, it is fairly obvious that the world is not homogenous. Whilst the Chinese leapfrog the West and move to mobile banking, Europeans are seeing a surge of new banks trying to challenge the old, whilst the USA has megabanks…

I’ve used a statement for a while now about the competitive landscape of finance in the future. It goes something like: Banks have millions of customers, billions of capital and centuries of history, but are hampered by heritage; Start-ups have no customers, little capital and no history, but are driven by vision; whilst Tech giants…

So, I’m presenting at a Corporate Treasury event, and we get into talking about distributed ledger technology (DLT) and blockchain. Comments are made around so many tests and proofs of work and concept, but so little production. At this point, someone made the comment that it will happen from the ground up, as corporates start…