I was recently interviewed by Emerging Markets Review just before travelling to Korea in July. The interview lasted a while, but stunned me when they produced the magazine with yours truly front page and centre. Rather than saying anything more, here's the interview which you can download as a PDF if you prefer. The global…
I’ve discovered lots of lists of Fintech unicorns. The main list is from Jim Bruene; there's a nice list that is from a European's perspective by Bernard Lunn; and a UK list published by me the other day. In fact, in preparing some charts yesterday, I scraped the list of Unicorns and valuations as of last week…
It’s mid-summer and quiet, but there is some interesting stuff still happening, particularly when we talk about Unicorns. Do you believe in Unicorns? Unicorns, in technology terms, are companies with valuations of more than $1 billion that have launched since 2000. There are quite a few of them out there including Uber, Airbnb, Twitter, Whatsapp,…
I just attended a digital bank bootcamp in Singapore. It wasn’t much of a bootcamp. For example, I volunteered to play the Sergeant Major’s role and shout at the audience: “stand up, stand up, get your digital gear on and start delivering, you lazy lackadaisical wunch of bankers” … I was told that was not…
Since asking a while ago who will be the Uber of banking, I’m fed up with everyone talking about the Uber of banking. For example, two headlines caught my eye this morning: Visa Invests in Stripe to Prep for the 'Uberization' of Retail; and Will Uber be the Uber of banking? Both stories are interesting, and demonstrate the…
One of my good connections via social media is Huy Nguyen Trieu. Huy writes a regular blog at Disruptive Finance, as well as being a Managing Director for Macro Structuring at Citi. He posted something in the last week that I felt was worth re-posting here as a guest blog. The One Chart you Need to…
I have this mantra in my presentations about payments. Payments is being attacked by Fintech startups like Klarna, Square, Stripe, Alipay, PayPal (Venmo, Braintree) and more. In fact, according to VentureScanner, it’s the second most active area for investors after lending (P2P and crowdfunding) … … and the most mature sector for new competition to traditional…
So everyone’s excited about Fintech, but Fintech is nothing new. Fintech is actually pretty old. I could claim that if Fintech is about providing technology platforms to exchange finance, then that’s been around since banks first implemented technology platforms in the 1960s. In fact, I do claim that banks are Fintech companies. They are the…
Following our regular weekly interview, the Finanser talks this week with one of Europe’s fastest growing unicorns, Klarna, in conversation with co-founder and Deputy CEO Niklas Adalberth, To begin with, perhaps you can tell me how you and your colleagues came up with the idea of Klarna. Sure. When we started this company, the entire…
