Future

Feb 1, 2010

2013 Vision of Banking

Commonwealth Bank of Australia put this video onto YouTube the other day: It's a vision of 2013. Come back here in three years and see if it's come true! I'm fairly sure that, if it is, then this is how you'll be getting to work (thanks to Barclaycard): Cool!

Jan 28, 2010

You might miss this regulation, but don’t

With so much hullabaloo about banker's bonus taxes, taxes on liabilities, a return to narrow banking, the closure of leveraged prop trading, bankers versus Obama, Sarkozy and Davos, you might miss a few key changes in emphasis. For example, the bankers view as demonstrated by Bob Diamond's comments yesterday: 'World leaders may find it increasingly…

Jan 20, 2010

Twitter’s Jack Dorsey reinvents US card payments

Everyone's getting real excited about Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, and his new payments application for the iPhone called Square. If you haven't seen it, here it is: In a lengthy interview with Pymnts.com, Dorsey says: "We can provide a lot of things that I think have been missing in payments – specifically like…

Jan 11, 2010

This year’s big thing: Augmented Reality

I’ve been noticing more and more apps for providing information about our environment. Known as augmented reality – rather than artificial reality where you go into a completely fictitious world – the use of such services is increasing rapidly. A good example is the SkyMap app on the Google Android mobile: Simply holding up your mobile to the night…

Jan 7, 2010

Battleground 2010: Sharks versus Gorillas

After West Side Story, the Sharks got over the Jets and are now targeting the Gorillas. Actually nothing to do with music or film, we’re talking banks. Back in the 1950s you had large banks (Sharks) being run around by small banks (Jets) who were nimbler and quicker … so the large banks acquired them…

Jan 5, 2010

2010: what’s in store for the technology of banking?

After various predictions yesterday, including the return of Glass-Steagall and a Chinese bank buying an American or European one, today it’s the turn of technology. There are lots of questions about technology, such as: Will Google make us stupid? Will we live in the cloud or the desktop? Will social relations get better? Will the…

Jan 4, 2010

2010: what’s in store for the business of banking?

Each year, I try to start the year with a few predictions of what will happen. Last year proved to be pretty accurate, although it was playing fairly safe. This year is fuzzier in outlook, with not a great deal of obvious trends emerging. But a few that seem likely are: Certainty in the economy…

Dec 22, 2009

A few incorrect predictions for 2009

After reviewing how my five predictions for 2009 did, I was fascinated to get a note from Business Week with the ten worst predictions made for the year. Mine did not make the list, but my good friend Stephen Timewell from the Banker is on there: "In short, under the robust leadership of Sheikh Mohammed,…

Dec 21, 2009

Five predictions: were they right?

Back in January, I made five firm predictions for banking in 2009. Those predictions were: More major European and American banks disappear There will be some spectacular failures in the BRIC economies A Global Financial Regulatory Body is formed The US will drop IFRS Solvent banks gain major market share. So what happened? 1) More…

Dec 18, 2009

Sberbank’s Branch of the Future

There have been many attempts to create the branch of the future (Accenture, IBM, John Ryan … Deutsche Bank, Barclays Bank, Umpqua Bank …), and so I was intrigued to hear that Sberbank in Russia had made a major investment in creating a flagship branch in Moscow. I meant to drop in during my recent…