Future

2023 is proving to be a really weird year. On the back of a pandemic, we have a world where interest rates are rising, business is contracting, tax is going up and confidence is going down. I cannot see anywhere in the world that is stable or normal. We have war in Europe; China has…

I just shared a speech by Christopher J. Waller, member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, that started with this comment: “Climate change is real, but I do not believe it poses a serious risk to the safety and soundness of large banks or the financial stability of the United States.”…

I’ve had this thing about decentralised finance for some time. The reason? Libertarians say that we can now have money without government. From my side, I argue that’s wrong. You can’t have money without government. The question is: who is the government? You cannot have money without government, but the government can just as easily…

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 was thinking the other day: why do we have money? Why are we slaves to the system? Can we break free? It made me think about whether anyone can live without money. After Googling the idea, it amazed me how many people do live without money. There’s even books about it. For example, in Life…

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,…

I was reflecting on the idea of embedded finance and invisible banking yesterday. It’s a great idea. We can use tech to make the world a place where you can pay for anything, anywhere at anytime. Sounds good, but is it? Some people – many who are not in our cocooned world of salaries and…