Fintech

For the last more than a decade, all I’ve ever heard bankers say is that bitcoin is a scam, a Ponzi scheme, purely useful for money launderers, paedophiles and terrorists. So, why are banks now offering bitcoin services? For me, this is one of the biggest questions, but the answer …

I see more and more stories about banks messing up customer accounts, system outages, data mismanagement, issues with technology and more. This is the one thing a bank cannot mess up. Airlines may mess up a booking; Amazon may mess up a delivery; BT or AT&T may mess up a …

A new series of Shark’s Den is about to launch. You know the one, where investors meet young people who pitch ideas and, if they like them, they invest a bit of money for 80% of the business? I love the way the sharks ask questions like: How much are …

From July 12, I will be chairing FinTech Week London. It’s my first time leaving home since February 2020, and a major moment as it’s also the first physical conference on FinTech that I’ve seen so far (Money 2020 and more to come). FinTechWeek London takes place from July 12-16 …

Just received Findexable’s annual report on FinTech hubs and developments, which finds San Francisco, London and New York as the key FinTech hubs of the world. Behind those cities, Montevideo (Uruguay), Hangzhou (China) and Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) are making great gains. What’s going on? Here’s the outline in the intro …

I was struck the other day by how many words are bandied about so much that they become meaningless. Then realised that many of these words fall into buckets. Then listed the buckets and they fell into two tribes: digital and analogue. The list is non-exhaustive and misses some bits …

Money 2020 has just dropped an interesting report talking about FinTech 2.0 (although I’m already on FinTech 5.0). In fact 2.0 is a pretty old idea, as outlined in this blog from June 2016, so I think the context of the report is a bit off but the content is …

As someone who has set up a number of small businesses, there are three major tasks that I hate: Doing the accounts Tax returns Invoices As the business owner, all I want to do is my job, to have fun, to get on with creating more customers and more business. …

I posted a joke the other day. The joke was that we had not ordered anything online yesterday, and our usual delivery guy called by today to check we were OK. The joke made me realise something. The realisation is that we really have pivoted from a world of stores …

FinTech is reaching parts of the planet that could never be reached before. Actually, it’s not FinTech. It’s the network. By way of example, way back in 1995, I was asked if I seriously thought someone could make a payment from the top of Mount Everest? I said yes, and …

Very interesting article on AltFi about FinTech unicorns tripling in value this year. Here’s a few selected lines: In the first quarter of 2021 alone, UK fintechs raised more than $2.9bn in funding, an increase of 331 per cent on the same period in the year before … in June 2020, Checkout.com became …

The balance between regulation and innovation. On the one hand, a country wants start-ups to start up in their country; on the other hand, when dealing with financial services, you have to ensure that it is done in a way that protects citizens and society. That’s a delicate balance, as …

I’m starting to worry about FinTech as they seem to have fallen foul of regulatory compliance and, as a consequence, customer trust. The biggest challenge for a challenger is to keep customer trust AND regulatory compliance. This is what we are seeing having consequences today. The fact I’m starting to …

Building on yesterday’s blog where I mentioned Monzo’s issues of client onboarding, I mentioned that, for the past few months, I’ve noticed many tweets from Monzo customers about accounts being closed suddenly, with no explanation. Each time, I’ve shared the information and copied Monzo and asked them to explain. Hey …

It’s a bank holiday weekend, and I would normally switch off. But no. Like so many of us, I’m still watching the news, keeping up-to-speed on twitter and facebook, scanning my emails and getting links. One link led me to a documentary on YouTube. It hooked me because someone mentioned …