Future

I haven’t blogged much about my friends from Hangzhou (China) lately, as it is all in a state of flux, but what I can say is that the will of the people – President Xi – appears to be strong. If you haven’t seen the latest nuance, Ant Group are now sharing customer data with…

For years, people have argued that you need branches to serve customers for more complex transactions: to serve people who are uncomfortable with digital access; to serve young people getting their first mortgage; to serve retailers and small businesses with their cash needs; and so on and so forth. Baloney. To be honest, I’ve advocated…

I watch too much online these days. Streaming from Amazon, Netflix, Apple TV and more, means you can spend the whole day just binge-watching rubbish. I’ve found myself reverting to watching some older movies, like those made in the 2000s. Fifteen years. 15 years. 15yrs. It’s a long time passing. I put on something the…

I was talking with a friend in Asia and went back to my traditional discussions of how Asia, Africa and LatAm markets are shaking up finance more than Europe and America. They then asked me the difficult question: But what about President Xi? Urmmm, what about President Xi? Well, it’s the question of China’s recent…

What is time? Do you have any idea? What is the time right now? Does it exist? Einstein says ‘no’. “Time does not exist. We invented it.” Some guy called Albert pic.twitter.com/JS9JMfEyJk — Chris Skinner (@Chris_Skinner) August 28, 2021   Building on Einstein’s quote, I used to regularly present that the world has no borders. We…

Simon Taylor posted an interesting dialogue about BaaS the other day. He used a couple of charts to illustrate the banking stack. The easiest and most basic one is this: I quite like it but, as Simon himself notes, there’s lots of nuance missing here. So let me add my layer of nuance, and it’s the…

I just picked up Deloitte’s report on blockchain where 76% of finance executives have voted that digital currencies may overtake fiat currencies in the next decade*. Most of us would just read that statement and go meh. Not me. That’s a phantasmagorical statement. People in finance think fiat currencies are dead? What? If true, we…

I was intrigued by a new report from the IMF entitled: The Impact of Fintech on Central Bank Governance (you can download it for free). I was particularly intrigued by its opening: Central bank governance is a concept composed of four constitutive and interrelated components: a central bank’s (i) mandate, comprising its objectives (the “why”),…

I heard a statistic on the BBC that natural disasters due to weather are costing the insurance industry seven times more today than in the 1970s. Is that because people insure against such issues more today? Partly, but it’s also because there are more natural weather disasters happening. For example, take this chart from Statista: Source:…

A while ago, I spotted that Watford was sponsored by Bitcoin. They must have made a mint out of that and will be buying up Harry Kane soon, if he’s not already gone somewhere else. Nevertheless, I wanted their shirt. In fifty years, who knows what a football team shirt, sponsored by Bitcoin, would fetch…