Future

For years, we have been told that digital makes everything better by making everything faster, cheaper and easier, and that the ultimate objective should be a world in which we can click here, tap there, buy now, pay later and complete the whole process without thinking about it. The great mantra of digital commerce has…

The Bank of England has released its latest report on artificial intelligence in financial services. The numbers are impressive. The reality is less so. Banks are embracing AI at extraordinary speed, but are they transforming banking or just making yesterday’s banking cheaper? The Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority have just published their latest…

When Google Goes Down, Your Bank Goes Down. Who Is Really in Control? We spent decades worrying about banks being too big to fail. Now we have a handful of technology companies that are too important to fail, and yesterday demonstrated why that should terrify us. I’ve recently been blogging and writing about the dangers…

I’ve been a little bit prolific in writing this year, what with two books in Pulp Finction and Intelligent Bank consistently in the top 10 on Amazon. Now, I have one more new book. It started with a question in my head: how come Pharaohs had so much power? It ended with the colonisation of Mars. The new book Who…

There is something wonderfully hypocritical happening in banking this week. American banks have started blocking AI bots from access to customer accounts: ‘You don’t want rogue agents’: Jamie Dimon bars outside AI agents like Meta’s Muse from JPMorgan accounts Citi becomes latest US bank to restrict AI agents from accessing accounts JPMorgan Chase, Citi and…

I was at a presentation last week where a guy from Canada shared the Wealthsimple story. I was not familiar enough with it, although I had heard of them, but the guy showed their advert and it cracked me up. #mustwatch For decades, Canadian banking has been dominated by a handful of powerful institutions with…

Global trade is breaking apart. The winners won’t be the ones who move. They’ll be the ones who connect. For years, the global trade conversation has been dominated by one question: where should we move our supply chains? China is risky, America is unpredictable, Europe is expensive and geopolitical tensions are making international commerce look…

It’s SIBOS week and so lots of research and news announcements. Two caught my attention though, as I always look forward to what McKinsey and Cap Gemini are saying in their payments reports. The both tell the same story from different angles, namely that the payment is disappearing. Not disappearing in the sense that we…

For many years, McKinsey has been the go-to firm for advice and Gartner for research but, with AI, why bother? In fact, there is a lot of debate about whether AI will replace consultants and research firms such as McKinsey and Gartner. The thing is that this conversation misses the bigger change. What’s that? It…

I spotted a fascinating post from Stephany Kirkpatrick on LinkedIn that gets straight to the heart of one of the biggest opportunities and failures facing wealth management today. Stephany is a successful founder and entrepreneur who founded Orum in 2019, sold it to Stripe in 2025 and has now started another venture called Pretty Smart…