Fintech

For most of us, the cost of a trade is whatever the screen says. You click buy, you click sell, and somewhere in the middle a small amount of money quietly leaves. Nobody sends you an invoice. Nobody itemises it. And that is precisely the interesting bit, because how that cost is structured tells you…

You’ve been thinking about cryptocurrencies all wrong. Every few months someone declares that cryptocurrency is dead. In fact, there’s a website dedicated to recording every one of those predictions. The latest panic is bitcoin’s price falling below $65,000 and Coinbase reporting weaker revenues. A few months earlier everyone was predicting Bitcoin would hit $200,000. Before…

Back in 2021, PayPal was worth around $360 billion. Today it is worth closer to $50 billion. That’s one of the biggest destructions of market value we’ve seen in fintech, and yet it isn’t because the company stopped growing. Quite the opposite. PayPal still moves almost $2 trillion every year, serves around 440 million active…

One person in seven has no access to formal financial services. One person in six lives with a disability. We normally think of these as two separate inclusion challenges. They are not. They are the same problem. Financial systems were designed around a single type of customer, leaving millions of others behind. For decades, financial…

For centuries, we’ve designed the world for the able-bodied and called everyone else disabled. Today, technology is quietly rewriting those rules. It is making finance, communication, work and everyday life adapt to people, rather than forcing people to adapt to systems. Increasingly, I think disability tells us less about the individual than it does about…

I was recently interviewed for a podcast about Agentic AI in payments and finance. Here’s how the interview went: You’ve been writing and speaking about agentic commerce for a while. When did it click for you that this wasn’t just another tech buzzword. What was the moment you thought, “this one is real”? The answer…

There are moments in technology when something shifts so fundamentally that the existing infrastructure suddenly looks like it belongs to another era. We saw it with the internet, when pages became platforms. We saw it with smartphones, when every business suddenly needed an app. Now we’re seeing it again as artificial intelligence moves from answering…

I blogged in February that Stripe might buy PayPal. That prediction is now coming true after a reported $53 billion bid by Stripe, backed by private equity firm Advent International, to acquire the OG, and this is far more than just another fintech acquisition. If it succeeds, it would probably be the most significant deal…

Every now and again I look at the week’s fintech headlines and realise they tell a much bigger story than anyone intended. This week was one of those weeks. One headline celebrated the UK cementing its position as Europe’s fintech powerhouse, with 24 unicorns collectively worth almost $160 billion. Another reported that PayEm, a fintech…

Whilst most of the world is still debating whether AI should sit inside an app, Tencent – the Chinese Tech Titan – has quietly embedded an intelligent assistant inside one of the largest digital ecosystems on the planet. To appreciate why this matters, you first need to understand the scale of the platform. WeChat, known…