Fintech

A short time ago, I hosted an interesting group for the Nordic Finance Innovation meetings.  The meeting gathered several of the leading-edge Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) companies that have launched in the last few years including Bud, Clearbank, Leveris, Saxo Bank and Solaris.  Building on each others narrative it soon became clear that anyone could launch a…

I grew up with America as the dream. However, in the past two decades, China has become the second world superpower, whether the Americans like it or not. This is not me having a love thing for China. It’s just a fact. The Americans don’t like it. Google China as a superpower and most US…

Gemuel Franco over at Fried.com shared a great infographic on bitcoin with me, so I thought I should share it with you. Checkout the history below and note that the original exchange rate of 1,309.03 bitcoins to a dollar would now equate to circa $5.5 million. Not a bad investment.

I get press releases all the time and generally ignore them. In fact, I don’t know why they email me, as I never post them on the blog. Uh-oh. I just got one that I’m posting on the blog. Floodgates opening.   What will happen when Amazon opens a bank. It is not such a…

For the second time in the last decade, I have been invited as a Contributing Subject Matter Expert to join in research by the World Economic Forum about how technology is changing banking. These are heavyweight projects involving years of research and hundreds of people.  Therefore, I take the content seriously. Here is the latest…

I was talking with a few FinTech firms the other day. They are all fully licensed banks, and are less than 15 years old. They all seem to have one thing in common: refreshment. What I mean by this is that they talk about technology in a very different way to traditional banks.  Traditional banks,…

I keep trying to define and delineate more and more of this FinTech Wave. It is no longer FinTech, but PayTech, IDTech, InsurTech, WealthTech, RegTech, GulfTech and more. The thing that strikes me the most is that there are two fundamentally different FinTech camps: those attacking existing business structures and those creating new structures. For…

I enjoyed this article in the Evening Standard by Melanie McDonagh and thought I would share it here, to see what reaction it gets. The loss of our high-street banks will make us all poorer — but not financially If you have tears, reader, prepare to shed them now. My bank in Berkeley Square is closing. From November,…

Just found an interesting document from Harvard Business Review with the title: How financial services views the digital agenda. It is the result of research conducted by the Harvard Business Review with the Genpact Research Institute, looking at the impact of digitalisation in finance, and confirms something I have been saying for years. A majority…

A year ago, I wrote a piece about Fin and Tech being like Father and Son. The thing that I was noting is the chasm between bank leadership teams, who are generally men over 50, and FinTech startups, who typically have young visionaries and significant diversity. It’s a theme I’ve returned to regularly. It is…