Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

Fintech

Does your financial provider give you a shallow or deep relationship?

As usual, clicking over LinkedIn, I got a chart that made me sit back and smile a bit. What chart? This one: Source: Brice Groche, LinkedIn The chart outlines the revenue models of Europe’s digital finance firms, and what it made me realise is the big difference in strategies of challenger banks and start-ups. When…

The Bank of England is pretty opinionated about Fintech

I just stumbled across a rich vein of information from the Bank of England on Fintech! Interestingly, they state that their “work focuses on three cross-cutting technologies: artificial intelligence (AI), distributed ledger technology (DLT), and quantum computing”. Urmmm … what about crypto and CBDCs? Anyways, the bank makes clear that it is committed to support…

My bot buys from your bot

I’ve talked for some time about bot-to-bot payments in the Agentic AI world. The idea is that you won’t have to think as money thinks for you, and payments will transfer automatically without intervention. Moving this forward is a recent announcement from Google, which has developed the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open framework that enables agents…

The multibillion market that many are missing

Building on yesterday’s blog about Project Nemo, it’s worth mentioning the Purple Pound. Every year, Britain celebrates Purple Tuesday – in case you missed it, it was last week – and it is all about recognising the massive community in all countries who are financially challenged. 78% of people who have disabilities find it difficult to…

Isn’t fraud just good marketing?

My friend Rik Coeckelbergs wrote an interesting update about a speech by  Paul Maskall, Strategic Fraud Prevention and Behavioural Lead, UK Finance, at the Open Banking Expo. He specifically noted a question Paul asked the audience: “What’s the difference between fraud and marketing?” and thought that the only difference “lies in the endgame: whether the purpose…

Payments in the year 2030 research misses the mark

I just picked up this report by Finextra and ACI Worldwide on Payments in the year 2030. The research surveyed over 160 people in C-level financial roles around the world and found that most of them are still thinking about how to move to cloud-based solutions; still grappling with how to do real-time payments; still…

For every success, there are many failures #Varo

We all revel in the buoyance of fintechs succeeding. What about those who fail? Notable fintech failures include BlockFi: A crypto lending and exchange company that collapsed during the 2022 crypto crisis, partly due to its relationship with FTX (FTX was a fintech failure as was MtGox). Then there are companies like Fast, a one-click checkout company…

Will Sophia replace me?

I asked AI to tell me about the future of banking the other day. It responded with a great set of answers: The future of banking is being reshaped by technology, shifting customer expectations, and new regulatory and economic realities. Here are the key trends that will define the next 5–10 years: 💡 1. Banking…

PNBL or BNPL?

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…

The next wave of tech change

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…