As the internet reinvents commerce on this planet, it’s interesting to see the two things that enter the innovation mix: simplicity combined with connectivity. When you think about the Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Google, Amazon and more, you realise that they have all simplified some complex things from sharing to finding. Google’s home page has stayed…
I was flicking through the Economist this week and was surprised to see a big quarterly special all about Fintech. Wow, this stuff is hot, hot, hot. That’s what the magazine makes clear: From payments to wealth management, from peer-to-peer lending to crowdfunding, a new generation of startups is taking aim at the heart of…
This is a blog from the Hotwire PR website, written by Camilla Ives. It summarises my good friend John Chaplin's Payments Innovation Jury Report report well. The report has been produced annually for the past four years and John will be presenting this in person to the Financial Services Club in England (June) and Poland…
I just sat through a nice presentation from Cognizant President Prasad Chintamaneni at the CEB Summit in Boston … … and was pleased to see others referring to channels and front-end investments as sticking lipstick on a pig. Something I’ve been saying for a while, as you have to re-engineer the core to be fit…
Just to finish off my contention that banking is not being disrupted, just evolved or adapted if you prefer, it’s worth a thought about what would it take to cause a disruption. First, I don’t think of disruption in a dictionary sense but in the sense that Clayton Christensen meant it in the book The…
Building on the discussion of data being key to disruption, I often use the phrase ‘digital core’ in this context. Therefore, I was intrigued when someone asked for a definition of a ‘digital core’ and one of the replies was there isn’t a core anymore. I wondered what they meant and, in explanation, they referred to…
I just finished presenting on Digital Bank strategies and Fintech, and was asked a wide range of questions: How do we transform our legacy structures? What is the biggest obstacle to becoming a digital bank You mention partnerships but all cooperative structures failed in the past, how can we succeed in the future? Can you…
I’ve heard a lot of talk this morning about Big Data at a conference here in Barcelona, and had a realisation half way through. The conversation was all about the move from mass markets and customer segmentation to the market of one and peer-to-peer personalisation. In other words the deep data mining demanded by Don…
I just picked up Silicon Valley Bank’s latest report on Fintech, and it makes fascinating reading. Here are the headlines: the fourth quarter of 2014 was the busiest time in fintech history, with 214 deals taking place globally; the entire fintech market saw 211 acquisitions in 2014 alone, making it the most prolific period of…
