I recently had a chat with the folks of Machine Lab. Here’s what happened … An acclaimed author and independent commentator whose insights on financial markets and fintech are second to none, Chris Skinner was one of the founding minds behind the world’s first mobile bank and has advised some of the most prominent CEOs and leaders…
Over the past years the financial industry has had a weird relationship with the cryptocurrency industry. The former was launched thousands of years ago; the latter just over a decade ago. Maybe that’s why. But, during my experience, we started with financial markets saying cryptocurrencies didn’t matter; then that the technology, namely blockchain, mattered but…
I’ve seen so many updates about Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) lately that it’s obviously an inevitability. Maybe … Bear in mind we have CBDCs and cryptocurrencies. Are the two in competition or complimentary? I think that’s a really important question. The question is: which do you trust more? Trust in CBDCs is that, because…
FedNow is the faster payments service for America, backed by the US Government and delivered by the Federal Reserve banks. The thing is that you, like me, may be asking is this real? America is getting faster payments in 2023 when many other economies got them in the 2000s? Well, yes and no. The UK…
I claimed that the crisis of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Credit Suisse were isolated cases, specific to those institutions, and there is no financial contagion. Then we get all these headlines about Deutsche Bank being next. What’s going on? Well, I still claim it is not contagion, but there is lots of FUD (Fear,…
This week, Bill Gates has written a long essay on the impact AI (Artificial Intelligence) will have on the world. Paraphrasing his essay, these are the highlights for me: I was so excited about their work [OpenAI/ChatGPT] that I gave them a challenge: train an artificial intelligence to pass an Advanced Placement biology exam. Make…
A key to invisible finance is a digital identity and this is the hardest thing to crack. It’s been tried many times and failed often. Equally, there are many companies and institutions trying to solve this, but no-one seems to have succeeded. Having said that, Digiwatch estimate that governments will have issued about 5 billion digital IDs globally…
A couple of headlines hit me recently. The first is that twitter is going to create a payments system: Twitter has begun applying for regulatory licences across the US and designing the software required to introduce payments across the social media platform and then, more interestingly, is that Microsoft is going to do the same, but…
