Future

I spent the morning thinking about the bank of the future. It’s something I do every day. You could be simple and say that it’s embedded, invisible, everywhere, all the time. And that is true. But that is today’s bank, not tomorrows. I then have this debate about currencies. What currency do we believe in?…

BEAR IN MIND I AM NOT A FINANCIAL ADVISOR For the past three decades, investors have lived through an extraordinary illusion: the belief that globalisation makes the world safer. It doesn’t. It just made conflict more expensive. I always remember when the Iraq war began in the 1990s and my colleagues in the government defence…

There are a number of themes that shape our view of the world. For me, Star Trek and Star Wars and lots of other sci-fi. I love visions of the future from Metropolis to Minority Report. There are others that are meant to frighten us too, such as Alien, The Terminator and Ex Machina. We…

I gave a TEDx talk last year about the jobs our children will have in the future … … and it is a theme I keep returning to because I have twin boys who are ten years old now. The school they go to are now looking for a new Board member, so I wrote…

I’ve just been reading McKinsey’s latest piece about the AI-powered bank. It reads like a polite consulting report, but underneath it is a fairly brutal critique of the entire banking industry because what they’re really saying – without saying it – is that most banks are structurally incapable of benefiting from AI. It not because…

The Bloomsbury Intelligence and Security Institute (BISI) produced a document yesterday about the risk of cryptocurrency to democracy . Seriously? Cryptocurrency is a libertarian dream that gives all of us a democratic vote. What risk is there? Well, let’s dig into the detail as this is not about “innovation in payments” or “the future of…

I always love looking back to the past for predictions of the future. From The Jetsons flying car to the communicator in Star Trek, there are so many examples of science fiction, much of which has become science fact. Just look at SpaceX’s reusable rockets or the Artemis II crew flying around the moon, and…

I’ve just read the regulatory roadmap that the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority released this week and realised that it is less a neat plan and more a recognition that the current system is broken and we’ve run out of road with Open Banking. For the past decade, Open Banking has been the poster child of…

I just had an interesting podcast conversation about stablecoins, Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and tokenised deposits. Most people in finance think they understand the differences, but it’s worth pausing for a moment, because the distinctions really matter. At a very simple level: stablecoins are privately issued digital tokens (think USDC or Tether) backed by…

It was interesting that, last week, US regulators called an urgent meeting with the CEOs of the largest banks last Thursday, after the emergence of a new AI model from Anthropic called Claude Mythos. The reason wasn’t hype – it was capability. This model appears able to identify deep vulnerabilities in widely used software and…