Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

Fintech

Is ethical banking a generational thing?

I’ve been writing and thinking a lot about ESG – Environment, Sustainability and Governance – as it’s the theme of my next book. Then up popped a headline: Prince Harry and Meghan are joining Ethic, a fintech asset manager in the fast-growing environmental, social and governance space, “My husband has been saying for years, ‘Gosh,…

What has Open Banking ever done for us?

Talking of Open Banking, I hosted a dinner focused upon Open Banking and Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) in London the other night. The conversation was with neobanks and challengers and was an interesting mix of old and young views. For example, someone opened by saying that BaaS and Open Banking has hardly delivered anything. It’s disappointing and clearly…

Is there a good way to shut a customer down?

My mate Dave Birch wrote a Forbes piece the other day titled Unbank the Banked. I thought it was going to be a story about how banks are ejecting thousands of customers due to poor onboarding. Instead Dave wrote about the unbanked don’t necessarily need banks. It’s a good piece, but there is also the…

Open Banking is finally here … it’s only taken 30 years!

The financial marketplace is becoming incredibly diverse and niche. Instead of universal banks, we now have plug-and-play code. Some would call it an object-oriented market structure. The basics are that no one dominates this structure. Instead, there are boutique players at every level of the stratosphere. The universal provider is the one with the banking…

Are big bank fintechs unfairly valued?

I’ve watched Marcus for a while and was not surprised to see its founder is leaving. There are those who are great at building companies and those who are great at running companies. They are rarely the same person. In fact, some of the greatest companies were created by builders and runners. Walt Disney is…

Why do we need banks and branches?

For years, people have argued that you need branches to serve customers for more complex transactions: to serve people who are uncomfortable with digital access; to serve young people getting their first mortgage; to serve retailers and small businesses with their cash needs; and so on and so forth. Baloney. To be honest, I’ve advocated…

Anyone can be a bank … really?

Hmmm … the wonderful Anna Irrera posted an update on Reuters, stating that anyone can be a bank these days, along with her colleague Iain Withers. The article is about embedded finance, a term I dislike. I prefer invisible finance but hey, you win some, you lose some. The article notes that Accenture estimated in 2019…

I ran over the dog

I didn’t think I should share this, but I will. I ran over the dog. Like many other people during the pandemic, we were finally going to be stuck at home long enough to get a puppy. So, we got one. It made me realise that I’m a cat person. The dog was a pain….

Banks are creating their own successors

One of the things over-looked by many is how banks invest in the Finverse. According to Toptal’s data, 63% of banks invest in startups or set up accelerators, and many are instrumental in FinTech companies’ operations, fund raising and IPOs. Bear in mind that start-ups need bank accounts too, which creates a multi-dependency in the…

BaaS is not 2D or even 3D – it’s a Rubik’s Cube

Simon Taylor posted an interesting dialogue about BaaS the other day. He used a couple of charts to illustrate the banking stack. The easiest and most basic one is this: I quite like it but, as Simon himself notes, there’s lots of nuance missing here. So let me add my layer of nuance, and it’s the…

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