Fintech

Earlier this year, I summarised some of the best research papers that had been released on FinTech and Blockchain in three parts: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.  Thanks to Oliver Bussmann’s blog, I can now provide you with a list of the best research released on Fintech this year.  Enjoy! 2016-12 Digital Asset Holding Non Technical…

I’ve been talking a lot about open sourcing financial services this year and, more recently, tracking Open Banking.   The Open Banking Working Group was launched just over a year by HM Treasury to create an Open Banking Standard.  The standard is meant to guide how open banking data should be created, shared and used by its owners and those…

I’m relaxing and thinking.  A bad combination.  Just had several sessions with different conferences on Brexit, Open API’s, PSD2, Open Sourcing, Open Banking, Innovation and more … and it all seems like such drivel.  One of the sessions was asking the question: is it time to drop the curtain on innovation theatre?  Yes, for gawds…

I’ve noticed a great deal of schadenfreude related to the R3 bump.  Lots of people saying that blockchain is past its sell-by date, R3 are bust and distributed ledgers are dead.  I think it’s related to the journalists who, having delighted in bigging up blockchain big time for the past two years are now relishing…

When I was growing up, America was the superpower that we followed and Russia was in a Cold War.  Today, there are two superpowers – America and China – and Russia is still in a bit of a Cold War that might be thawed by Donald Trump. So when it comes to Fintech, there’s two…

I’ve recently been wowed by series such as House of Cards (Netflix) and The Man in the High Castle (Amazon), and am really blown away by The Crown (Netflix) and The Grand Tour (Amazon).   I’m blown away not because these are good internet shows, which they are, but by the budgets being spent on them….

I blogged the other day about too many banks and that there’s not a big enough market for forty of them here in Britain.  It made me think about what do customers really want?  We talk about digital, apps, mobile and more, and yet the average customer … are they bothered?  I suspect that many…

Bye bye banking job for life Many of the banking folk I meet have been with the bank as man and boy, woman and girl.  It’s a job for life.  Funnily enough, I’ve never known one of those jobs.  I guess it’s because I work in tech, and many of the tech firms I’ve worked…

I’m a big fan of Kraken, the digital currency exchange in California, as it’s my main exchange for investing in digital assets.  If you want to know more, checkout their general overview at the end of this blog.  I’m also a fan of their blog, which regularly sends me interesting stuff and they’ve just launched…

As I look back on my travels this year, it’s interesting to see where I have and haven’t been.  Spent a lot of time in Singapore, Istanbul, London (obviously), New York and Washington.  I count these as my hotbeds of fintech innovation.  I’ve also briefly dropped in to Hong Kong, Berlin and Bangkok.  These are…