Many interesting, weird and wonderful things drop into my inbox, Facebook newsfeed and twitter status updates. Take yesterday. I was sent: a copy of the BBA’s Annual Abstract of Banking Statistics, lots of notes from my accountant, various invites to press shindigs, a note from FatBoy Slim, who is an England groupie at the World…
Spent a lot of time yesterday talking with folks about the future of money, payments and banking. The conversation got interesting in two particular areas: branches and mobile services. This is because I realised some things. Take branches. There appears to be an evolution of branch usage from underbanked economies through emerging economies to developed…
WARNING: THIS BLOG ENTRY WILL NOT CHEER YOU UP [sorry] I spent the morning with a group of futurists debating the long-term outlook for financial markets and am never sure about the usefulness of such debates, although there is definitely something of use in creating scenario plans for the future which is where we were…
There’s the classic old joke about the European dream being a place where the police are English, the chefs are Italian, the car mechanics are German, the lovers are French and the bankers are all Swiss. The nightmare is that it is a place where the police are German, the chefs are English, the car…
Whilst I hid in Singapore last week, Finovate – the excellent financial innovation conference run by Jim Bruene and co at NetBanker – took place in San Francisco. I wanted to go this year, as Finovate is definitely the one place you will find the NEXT generation of banking and financial solutions and providers. The…
Here's my latest retail payments focused presentation. It's premise is that there's loads of innovation out there, with micropayments and iPhone apps being hotbeds of innovation for developed economies whilst microfinance and 2G GSM messaging being creative fields for developing economies. However, all of these innovations are just froth on the cake of the payments…
Today seems to be a day about future trends. For example, I stumbled across a great discussion about the future of the internet with Google CEO Eric Schmidt: This is a 45 minute interview with Mr. Schmidt at a Gartner Symposium in the USA last year. Key comments from the interview, identified by Read-Write Web,…
