Future

FedNow is the faster payments service for America, backed by the US Government and delivered by the Federal Reserve banks. The thing is that you, like me, may be asking is this real? America is getting faster payments in 2023 when many other economies got them in the 2000s? Well, yes and no. The UK…

I claimed that the crisis of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Credit Suisse were isolated cases, specific to those institutions, and there is no financial contagion. Then we get all these headlines about Deutsche Bank being next. What’s going on? Well, I still claim it is not contagion, but there is lots of FUD (Fear,…

I was reflecting on the idea of embedded finance and invisible banking yesterday. It’s a great idea. We can use tech to make the world a place where you can pay for anything, anywhere at anytime. Sounds good, but is it? Some people – many who are not in our cocooned world of salaries and…

This week, Bill Gates has written a long essay on the impact AI (Artificial Intelligence) will have on the world. Paraphrasing his essay, these are the highlights for me: I was so excited about their work [OpenAI/ChatGPT] that I gave them a challenge: train an artificial intelligence to pass an Advanced Placement biology exam. Make…

A key to invisible finance is a digital identity and this is the hardest thing to crack. It’s been tried many times and failed often. Equally, there are many companies and institutions trying to solve this, but no-one seems to have succeeded. Having said that, Digiwatch estimate that governments will have issued about 5 billion digital IDs globally…

A couple of headlines hit me recently. The first is that twitter is going to create a payments system: Twitter has begun applying for regulatory licences across the US and designing the software required to introduce payments across the social media platform and then, more interestingly, is that Microsoft is going to do the same, but…

After a tumultuous week and weekend, everyone seems to be asking: is this another global financial meltdown? Bank runs, bailouts, rescues: are the ghosts of 2008 rising again? The Guardian Global banking is now inside Schrödinger’s box, The Financial Times What’s wrong with the banks, The Economist Megan Greene discusses the idea, in The Financial…

I often return to a theme: where’s my guarantee? Where’s my backup? After the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank during the past week, it begs the question: where’s my guarantee? Where’s my backup? After losing money on MtGox ten years ago: where’s my guarantee? Where’s my backup? With the failure of FTX and Terra-Luna: where’s…

Predictions about banking in the future After I posted my banks disappear post, Glenn Stanford replied to me on LinkedIn with a link to this: A history of the future of banking: predictions and outcomes by Maria Gloria Cobas and Larry R. Mote, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and James A. Wilcox, Haas School of…

There’s that line in George Orwell’s Animal Farm: All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others It always makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, as it would be nice if we had an egalitarian world where everyone was equal … but it’s never going to happen. This struck me when I was…