I have a number of big yawns when I watch the news these days. Banks are doomed!!! Yawn. Central banks are replacing money with digital money!!! Yawn. Buy bitcoin now and make millions!!! Yawn. COVID, vaccines, anti-vaxers!!! Yawn. The Earth is heating!!! Yawn. The climate is in an emergency!!! Yawn. The world will end!!! Yawn….
Green finance covers a wide range of financial products and services, which can be broadly divided into banking, investment and insurance products. Examples of these include green bonds, green-tagged loans, green investment funds and climate risk insurance. However, a friend of mine mentioned moving into a focus on spatial finance the other day. Spatial finance?…
I was reflecting on the fact that we work in our silo. Our silo is banking or FinTech or InsurTech or WealthTech or RegTech or whatever. What about HealthTech, FarmTech, PharmaTech, GovTech and all the other industries digitalising? What about if we linked them all together? That’s what future trends are indicating: an integration of…
There’s a movement to use data to track and trace every human on Earth. It’s an inexorable movement which citizens are allowing as they sleepwalk into George Orwell’s vision of 1984. The Ministry of Data brings together every bit and byte of your life, and monitors your activities. China has been leading this march towards…
I’ve recently shared a couple of quotes from years ago that gained a lot of social media traction. First, in 1953, Mark R. Sullivan of Pacific Telephone & Telegraph said: “In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today. It will require no dial…
I’ve been watching the headlines related to Joe Biden’s pick for the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). OCC is an interesting department, as it can issue national bank charters for US banks, and often runs into trouble. By way of example, under the previous Administration, the OCC tried to…
Talking of Open Banking, I hosted a dinner focused upon Open Banking and Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) in London the other night. The conversation was with neobanks and challengers and was an interesting mix of old and young views. For example, someone opened by saying that BaaS and Open Banking has hardly delivered anything. It’s disappointing and clearly…
Making a statement I was intrigued by a news headline that Lloyds Bank is turning bank statements into art. Sounds ridiculous? Who gets a bank statement anymore? We use an app. But then I read the piece and was more intrigued as yes, it’s been created with an artist. The artist is Paula Zuccotti, who…
