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…
One of the readers of the Finanser saw my write-up on asset and wealth management, and asked if I could talk about what’s happening in investment banking. Answer: yes, I can. It’s more difficult to see the Fintech stars and unicorns in the investment space however, as it’s more opaque having been disrupted by technology…
If asking what should we do about the Fintech disruption is the wrong question, what’s the right question? I would claim it is how can we change the bank to be a Fintech platform? A good illustration of this is HSBC and its past, present and future. Under John Bond, HSBC became a global financial behemoth, in the same…
I recently attended a conference in America, where the audience of mainly bankers could post questions to the speaker. During the digital bank discussion, here are the questions that came in and, purely because they are fairly common in everyday dialogue, I thought I would post and answer the questions here. Most are related to…
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…
