Future

Before you watch this week’s show on the biggest, most controversial and WTF stories of #fintechuncut, candid commentary on the biggest #Fintech and #FinancialServices stories of the week that was, how about a little quiz for yourself? The European Commission predicted something or someone to be on the road of irrelevance. Who or what is it? Never waste a…

My energy bills have shot up, like most peoples, so I rang the energy firm. I was greeted by you are 193rd in the queue. This didn’t sound good. After two and a half hours the phone was picked up. My bill doesn’t seem right, have you taken a reading? I asked. No, but the…

The year is 2122. The world has changed. The world is still here, just, but the frozen North and South is no longer frozen. The Earth is boiling. In terms of economics, China rules; India has surpassed America; Africa is still rising; whilst Europe is a mess. The Royal Family has disappeared and over a…

Written in 1922 Walter Lionel George, an English writer, wrote a piece for The New York Herald predicting the world a century ahead. Here is his piece – with a little bit lost in translation – and, tomorrow, I will post my view of the world in 2122. There is a good old rule which bids…

It’s Halloween. It’s time for a fright! And so Swiss Re decided to do just that. Some headlines catch my attention, and when Swiss Re launched a report about Zombie Businesses the other day, well … I had to read it. The report, after the headline, is less explosive, and is all about corporate debt: “The…

I’m watching things every day, and am immersed in DeFi, CeFi, WiFi and HyFi (not forgetting ReFi), but I read something the other day and thought: WTF? Let’s share it. Just bought an airplane ticket without having to add my name to it, and then I listed it to sell it back. This was through the TravelX protocol…

I got into a debate about currencies the other day. A colleague said that the future of money was power. Well, all power is based upon money, and his point was that money would be based upon power. The energy industries. Oil, gas, electricity. These are the key industries providing energy to the world. True,…

The world has reached a bit of a weird place. For years, the only way was up. Suddenly, it all seems like it is down. In fact, it seems to have gone off the rails and, in the classic phraseology stop the world, I want to get off. When times are good, markets are going…

The BBC just shared a report about Cruise, a self-driving company that has launched a commercial taxi service in San Francisco. The driverless future is here today. It made me reflect on where we are at. Where we are at is at a juncture where most menial tasks will be run by software. Taxi rides,…

I’ve said for years that MasterCard has the wrong name. Cards are so last century. This century is all about the chip, so MasterCard should be renamed MasterChip. For the first time the other day, I found a banker who agrees with me. Reuters reports that Brazil’s central bank chief Roberto Campos Neto said he believes…