Fintech

I hosted a banking dinner the other night, where we were talking about the FinTech scene in this particularly vibrant and innovative country.  It was under the Chatham House Rule, so I can’t say too much about who and where this dinner was, but it did amuse me half way through when we were talking…

I thought I’d wait until after the weekend to write a post about the implications of the UK election results.  It’s not my place to write about the pros and cons of the election campaigns, although I will say that the alienation of the elderly and those who are parents by the Conservative’s campaign –…

Twenty years ago, I was working on re-engineering projects.  Most of the time I was getting exasperated because the banks wouldn’t take on the big projects, like the mortgage process, as it went across too many divisions.  That’s big risk in their view, as it meant disturbing the structure of the organisation.  So, we would…

I recently hosted Nick Ogden, the founder of WorldPay and serial entrepreneur, at our Nordic Finance Innovation meetings in Stockholm and Oslo.  Nick is now launching the first new UK clearing bank for over 250 years called ClearBank.  I’d heard a few rumblings about ClearBank, but hadn’t really go the message until I saw him…

Someone made an interesting comment about Google this week: banks can attack Google’s soft underbelly. What? Google? Soft underbelly? And banks can attack it? You must be joking. The presenter (Conor McAleavey, Chief Innovatoin Officer with Leveris) went on to outline what he meant and, as he talked about it, I thought there may be…

I’ve written a lot about Ant and Alibaba, but not so much Tencent, even though QQ social networking in China was a hot, hot topic a few years ago.  It was the first social platform to launch its own currency and, with 300 million users, was quite interesting.  Things have moved at a pace and…

Expanding on yesterday’s discussion of how MNOs are sweeping up business for the underbanked and unbanked, Igor Pesin of Life.SREDA posted a lovely update giving even more detail.  Here is how he saw things … Fintech in Rwanda: the place where Telcos are surpassing Banks in the financial sector Telcos dominate in the financial sector…

During the discussions at Dot Finance Africa, there was a very interesting dialogue about the mobile network operators (MNOs), with panels featuring Airtel and M-PESA.  It was interesting to hear them talking directly about how they focus upon the customer experience and their singular objective of convenience.  Both MNOs talked about customer convenience.  The convenience…

I often think we need a reality check when it comes to digital finance.  Many of the pundit analysts and influencers out there believe no one needs a branch visit and that everything can be done remotely on devices.  I don’t.  I’ve mentioned this many times and, psychologically, customers need the reassurance that they can…