Fintech

I was just sent a press pre-release copy of The Pulse of Fintech, the quarterly global report on Fintech VC trends published jointly by KPMG International and CB Insights.  The findings are quite interesting this quarter and show that, after a significant pullback in funding in Q4 2015, mega funding …

I’m often asked whether banks should be afraid of the threat of Fintech.  My answer is that most Fintech is enhancing what banks do, rather than threatening their core business.  I sum this up as wrappers, replacers and reformers, and that the only Fintech firms we should really fear are …

ValueWeb makes the contention that you cannot have an internet of things without a real-time and cheap internet of value.  A core part of this is focused upon building a cheap shared ledger structure for digital identity and digital currencies and guess what?  That cheap shared ledger is most likely going …

Last week I chaired the inaugural Dot Finance Live conference in Nairobi, Kenya.  It is Africa’s premier FinTech event, drawing people from all over the countries of sub-Sahara Africa.  What struck me as I listened to lots of keynotes about mobile innovation and mobile financial inclusion, is that Africa is …

So there are some clear lessons we can learn as base foundation principles when reimagining banking for the 21st century: Everything is peer-to-peer networked It’s all in real-time globally Commerce is not just person-to-person but more machine-to-machine We are looking at the exchange of value between machines and individuals, not …

As we start to reimagine the bank, it is obvious that focus on the platform design and user experience is key, as demonstrated by YouTube.  A second key factor is recognising that the world has changed thanks to the mobile network.  We probably go yea, yea, yea when we talk …

I need a little time to think about my reimagined financial structure, but some of the basics are already in play such as the idea of thinking about value exchange rather than monetary exchange.  Value exchange is based upon the ability to reach the world with a thought.  I do …

After writing about whether we are creating faster horses when we think of applying open sourced technologies to banking, some more thoughts occurred to me: Are we applying Blockchain to clearing and settlement, rather than reimagining the whole trade cycle from liquidity structures to collateral management using open source platform …

I launched ValueWeb in Singapore yesterday and my friend Vladislav Solodkiy, Managing Partner at FinTech VC Fund Life.SREDA, hosted the evening.  He was kind enough to share his speech with me, so I thought I’d copy it here and share with you.  Enjoy! From BaaS and neobanks to FINTECH-BANK Fintech is currently …

I remember being involved in a business process re-engineering project for an insurance firm some years ago.  We looked at how the underwriting process worked on complex insurance risks and discovered that in the middle of the process, the documentation would move to the overseas desk.  It would sit there …

I regularly attend conferences where several themes crop up around disruption – that word we hate – disintermediation, and the end of banking as we know it.  The problem is I’ve heard it for 30 years and it hasn’t happened … yet.  Will it?  Let’s have a look. The first …

Talking about transformation at conferences every day gets you into a mantra.  My mantra is leadership and how banks lack technological leadership.  The pushback is that you have too many technologists without banking knowledge.  We need banks run by people who understand money, and they can tell the technologists what …

I know many of my twitter followers have seen this news already, but here’s the official announcement of the partnership we are creating with Life.SREDA in Singapore. SINGAPORE-BASED LIFE.SREDA LAUNCHES $100 MILLION BLOCKCHAIN INVESTMENT FUND LONDON, APRIL 18 2016 Life.SREDA, a venture capital fund based in Singapore, has partnered with …

One of the interviewees in my new book ValueWeb is Ron Suber, President of Prosper Marketplace Lending. Ron gave a speech last week which is summarized below. Well worth a read. Marketplace Lending: Evolution of an Asset Class (The following post is excerpted from a keynoted speech I gave at the …

I just had a really interesting, off-the-record, discussion with a banker. Can’t give too much detail therefore, but here’s how the conversation went: “So, what’s it like working for MegaRetailBank?” “Shocking”, he said. “They are completely branch focused. Here’s an illustration. They launched a new retail bank subsidiary in a …