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Fintech

Banks know it is better to be the second mouse

During one part of my recent conference activity, I asked the banks in the audience how they organised their innovation strategies.  All of them have one, is the good news.  All of them have different nuances of how they structure for innovation however.  The most common structure appears to be to have innovation under the…

Regulations, Innovations, Sandboxes and #RegTech

So I just attended a really interesting two day meeting that covered all things blockchain, regulations, innovation and more. I’ll blog about the bits I can in the next few days, and thought I’d start with an overview of the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) Regulatory Sandbox and Project Innovate. The Regulatory Sandbox was announced at…

Deloitte say Marketplace Lenders are NO threat to banks

I caught sight of a report by Deloitte over the weekend that says the marketplace lenders like Zopa and Lending Club are no serious threat to banks.  This follows the report by Goldman Sachs a year ago, that said 20% of bank lending will move to these platforms over the next decade.  Who’s right and…

The future of banking, money and finance [Presentation]

I’ve been presenting a summary of Digital Bank and ValueWeb for a few months now.  It is the story of the origins of moneykind and, as many have now heard the story, I thought it’s about time to share this on the blog. If you have half an hour free, then you can watch the presentation.  It’s been filmed…

Who said Fintech is dead? Q1 sees $5.7bn invested

I was just sent a press pre-release copy of The Pulse of Fintech, the quarterly global report on Fintech VC trends published jointly by KPMG International and CB Insights.  The findings are quite interesting this quarter and show that, after a significant pullback in funding in Q4 2015, mega funding rounds have lifted quarterly investment…

Fintech vs Banks is like the Mouse vs the Elephant

I’m often asked whether banks should be afraid of the threat of Fintech.  My answer is that most Fintech is enhancing what banks do, rather than threatening their core business.  I sum this up as wrappers, replacers and reformers, and that the only Fintech firms we should really fear are those that replace core bank…

Africa’s blockchain transformation

ValueWeb makes the contention that you cannot have an internet of things without a real-time and cheap internet of value.  A core part of this is focused upon building a cheap shared ledger structure for digital identity and digital currencies and guess what?  That cheap shared ledger is most likely going to be built in Africa. …

The African Mobile Revolution, Part One

Last week I chaired the inaugural Dot Finance Live conference in Nairobi, Kenya.  It is Africa’s premier FinTech event, drawing people from all over the countries of sub-Sahara Africa.  What struck me as I listened to lots of keynotes about mobile innovation and mobile financial inclusion, is that Africa is actually leading the world in…

Principles of The Reimagined Bank

So there are some clear lessons we can learn as base foundation principles when reimagining banking for the 21st century: Everything is peer-to-peer networked It’s all in real-time globally Commerce is not just person-to-person but more machine-to-machine We are looking at the exchange of value between machines and individuals, not just money Transactions are the…

Using intuitive interfaces for contextual commerce

As we start to reimagine the bank, it is obvious that focus on the platform design and user experience is key, as demonstrated by YouTube.  A second key factor is recognising that the world has changed thanks to the mobile network.  We probably go yea, yea, yea when we talk about mobile, as we’ve all…

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