Future

As it’s Friday the Thirteenth I thought I’d cheer you up with yet another core systems renewal story. There’s a great article that resonated with me in the Financial Times the other day, talking about ‘technical debt‘. The line that has stayed with me is this one: “Stripe estimates that developers spend about a third…

An interesting lunch discussion about data the other day. It started when someone had picked up on my blog about Ana Botin, where she made the comment: “Why should data be regulated in a different way if you’re called a bank and if you’re called something else … more than two billion people have a digital…

I’ve blogged many times that so called free banking is a fallacy.  It’s something I have blogged about for a decade, and the recurring theme is free banking should be banned by the regulator as it’s only free as long as you don’t go overdrawn. The result is that the most financially challenged group of…

I’ve noted that the bitcoin swings and roundabouts tend to often cycle around the hope and expectation of the US SEC giving approval to a bitcoin ETF … only to find that they never do and so it goes around. In an interesting article by Dave Weisberger on Coindesk, there may be a reason for…

I’ve said on a number of occasions recently that banking and finance is at the heart of the climate crisis. Banks provide the financing for fossil fuel firms who are destroying the planet. The key numbers: Coal supplies a third of all energy worldwide, with the top coal consumers and producers in 2018 being China, India, and the United States. Carbon…

Building on my discussion yesterday about offshore tax havens and decentralisation to avoid governance in both the physical and virtual world, there’s a more fundamental issue at large here. Tax avoidance. Some people hear the words “a tax” and interpret it as “attacks”. I heard a figure the other day that the UK Tax Office,…

People were surprised to see a headline that garnered much market shock: Markets Crash after reports that Binances Shangai Office Closed in Crypto Crackdown Argh. Crypto meltdown! I was amused to see a headline that garnered much online mirth: Markets Crash after reports that Binances Shangai Office Closed in Crypto Crackdown Because Binance doesn’t have…

In the last month, there’s been a wave of announcements from Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon about banking. We’ve seen Facebook’s major activities in trying to create a digital currency called Libra, and Apple’s move into finance with a credit card from Goldman Sachs which, in just a month, offered a $10 billion line of…

I just saw an interesting report produced and released by SIX Group that talks about the future of money.  SIX Group run payments and settlement processing out of Switzerland and, unsurprisingly, their view is that the most likely future is that there will be digital everything but still some cash around. My own view is…

I’ve said for a while that the Big Tech giants will not become banks. Amazon and Alibaba will do a lot of bank-like activities, but they will never move into full-service banking, as in offering deposit accounts. Why won’t they? Because that’s full banking activity which has all of the audit and compliance overhead that…