Fintech

My friend Ron Shevlin was putting some shade on Starbucks app this week. The reason is that some claim Starbucks is a bank because their prepaid app is so popular. Ron claims it is just PNBL – Pay Now, Buy Later – and is nothing to do with being a bank. The thing about his view…

I just got a whole new set of tech phrases from a Gartner report. Giving my interpretation, here we go: Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS) is a proposed framework for Device Direct connectivity using satellite and cellular communication combination. The framework enables partnership between satellite (specifically low Earth orbit [LEO]) providers and terrestrial mobile operators…

Giving away one of my trade secrets, I asked ChatGPT to give me suggestions about what to blog about and it came up with seven things: 🚀 1. The Rise of Embedded Finance 2.0 How non-financial platforms are evolving from offering simple payments to full financial ecosystems (e.g., credit, insurance, and investments built into SaaS,…

After my blog yesterday about mortgage by machines, I left out one key component: humans. You have to remember that machines don’t think, they only appear to think because we develop them that way. Sure, there may be sentient machines at some point in the future when we get to the great Singularity but, until…

I’m about to have a week in Kuala Lumpur, if anyone wants to meet-up, with a focus on Islamic Finance. I remember twenty years ago talking with Mike Hanlon who was founding the Islamic Bank of Britain (IBB), and he was telling me how UK Gov really did not understand the concept. What is the…

It was interesting that the Labour Party Annual Conference in Liverpool last week did not talk about digital identity schemes. This is the party in government who, days before the conference started, announced that all people who wanted to work in Britain would need a digital ID in their government app. Like the National Insurance…

Watching Sibos from afar – I haven’t been invited for a while due to being too provocative – I was not surprised to see that Quantum computing, AI, CBDCs, stablecoins, tokenization and blockchain are all making the headlines, as these are all the themes I spend my time presenting about around the world. Cybersecurity, AI…

I’ve just created a platform to tokenize idols. Any idol and even bits and pieces related to them. You can tokenize Taylor Swift’s underwear; tokenize Rory McIlroy’s golfing glove; tokenize Ryan Reynolds Wrexham shirt; or even tokenize Harry Kane’s big toe. After all, any part of an idol is worth something to a fan, so…

I was having a chat the other day. It was behind closed doors, under Chatham House Rule but, nevertheless, will share my thoughts here as the big question was: who are you marketing to? Several major football teams have bank brands all over them. Many websites are associated with financial brands. On television, there are…

Building on the last two blogs all companies, not just in finance, have been transformed through the connected, network economy. That was the last decade’s worth of digital transformation and has led analogue companies hoping that they are now digital natives, although many are digital immigrants, still with a log of their old analogue systems…