Future

Over the past two days, I have looked separately at two uncomfortable developments in banking. The first is that banks are moving more and more of their critical infrastructure onto a handful of global cloud platforms, while the second is that artificial intelligence is moving from helping humans make decisions towards making those decisions itself….

The last global banking crisis was driven by mortgages, leverage and institutions that all believed the same thing at the same time. The next one will be driven by machines doing exactly the same thing, except they will do it in milliseconds. For the last few years, everyone has talked about artificial intelligence (AI) as…

We spent the years after the financial crisis worrying about banks that were too big to fail. We forced them to hold more capital, more liquidity, write living wills, run stress tests and prove that governments would never again have to rescue the financial system because one enormous institution collapsed. Meanwhile, almost unnoticed outside technology…

There is a problem with the way we talk about cryptocurrency. Every time there is a major fraud, hack, Ponzi scheme or spectacular collapse involving crypto, the headlines quickly become another indictment of cryptocurrency itself: crypto is a scam; bitcoin is for criminals; digital currencies are dangerous … the whole thing should be shut down….

Three months ago, I wrote a short piece about Revolut but, since then, there has been an extraordinary amount of Revolut news: a banking licence in France; full banking status in Britain; conditional approval for a US national bank; a banking licence in Australia; banking operations in Mexico; expansion into Finland; licences in the UAE;…

Yes. The mistake is believing that the business case for AI is simply replacing people. If a bank employs 100 people costing £10 million and replaces them with AI costing £12 million, then viewed through the traditional cost-reduction spreadsheet AI has failed. Yet that calculation ignores what happens if those AI systems perform ten times…

Over the past year, I’ve been doing something slightly different. I’ve been writing fiction. Not just fiction, but Pulp Finction. The idea behind Pulp Finction is simple: Fun. Fact. Finance. Fiction. Keep track of the full series here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HG6DP7C4 and here: https://pulpfinction.com/ I’ve spent most of my life writing and talking about banking, money, technology…

UBS versus Switzerland: when a bank becomes too big for its country There is a delicious irony developing in Switzerland. The country that spent generations building its reputation around the strength, discretion and stability of its banks now finds itself arguing with its largest bank over whether making that bank safer will make it weaker….

There was a time when Donald Trump was not particularly keen on cryptocurrencies. In 2019, he declared that he was “not a fan” of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, arguing that they were highly volatile, based on thin air and potentially useful for unlawful activity. How things change. Today, President Trump is arguably the most important…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Crypto wanted to get rid of banks. Now they are banks. When Bitcoin launched in 2008, the whole idea was to get rid of banks and intermediaries. In 2026, they’ve learned the lesson I learnt years ago. That’s how the world works. You need intermediaries. The whole idea…