Future

Continuing with this year’s outlook, I was also impressed by EFG’s report on the top themes for 2026. EFG is a Swiss Private Bank, and their view of this year falls into three main categories as articulated by Moz Afzal, Chief Investment Officer of EFG, in the opening section. As we frame our outlook for…

Welcome to 2026, the year of the Horse in the Chinese New Year, which arrives in February. A Year of the Horse symbolizes forward momentum, encouraging bold actions and the pursuit of dreams. That sounds pretty good, but what’s gonna happen? Well, many are making bold predictions – I used to, but now get them…

I spotted a quote this week: “All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.” — Arthur Schopenhauer My mind immediately moved to bitcoin and cryptocurrency and, specifically, Jamie Dimon. For years, Dimon has said that bitcoin is a scam and yet, now,…

Many years ago, I was presenting to a country suffering sanctions. No longer able to access the SWIFT network and pretty much excommunicated by most banks worldwide, they were suffering. Of course, they could do nested accounts, where you bury your bank in a pyramid of other banks, but that is pretty complicated, so I…

Being raised on an independent island, I learned lots about British history. For my GCSE’s, it was all about learning Henry VIII’s story of leaving the Holy Empire of Rome to marry Anne Boleyn and the story of the first and second World Wars. We knew nothing about Europe, let alone the rest of the…

I just got an invite to invest in Spacecoin. What is that? SPACECOIN is a visionary cryptocurrency built for the space economy and designed to offer a decentralized, efficient, and secure platform for interplanetary trade investors and exploration. WTH? My initial reaction was the idea that this is launching a cryptocurrency for those who want…

I wanted to expand on my theory of a third technology revolution. The first technological revolution was the mainframe. It automated core administrative processing between back and front office. It is the infrastructure that built SWIFT, Visa and MasterCard. It’s the core platform of most banks, with almost half of them running on COBOL mainframe…

I take pride in how many things I’ve predicted in payments and finance. that have come true from Digital Banking to cloud to BaaS to crypto and more, but I didn’t predict a lot of things, such as the financial crisis of 2008, the sovereign debt crisis that followed and the pandemic that came after…

I asked AI to tell me about the future of banking the other day. It responded with a great set of answers: The future of banking is being reshaped by technology, shifting customer expectations, and new regulatory and economic realities. Here are the key trends that will define the next 5–10 years: 💡 1. Banking…

I was reading McKinsey’s annual summary of what’s hot and what’s not in banking the other day. They pick on four areas: Technology The new consumer Capital efficiency Targeted M&A What got me is that this is just PEST in other words. What’s PEST? It’s the way we predict the future based upon Political, Economic, Social…