Future

Building on my blog the other day about BLIK (the Polish digital wallet), I just got two really insightful pieces of analysis on European payments – talking of a payments vision – from PWC in a report on Europe’s open banking vision and Jeremy Light, a good friend formerly of Accenture, on EU wallets. Here’s the…

Two weeks ago, I asked where the UK Payments Vision is. It should have been delivered this year, and yet there is still no sign of it. Having said that, the Bank of England did start to build a view. In late July 2024, the Bank of England launched a Discussion Paper on Innovation in money…

You may be wondering about the headline of this blog, but it’s all about the rapidly changing would of money. It used to be simple. Government would control monetary supply in the economy and wholesale and retail banks would distribute such money to businesses and citizens. It’s still the same, just that it’s all moving…

As mentioned, I’m dealing with my mother’s financial affairs as she reaches end of life, and I’m finding it incredibly frustrating. The process is that there first needs to be a Power of Attorney in place. Luckily, she saw that coming and gave it to me. That’s a government portal which allows me to take…

There’s a really interesting research paper recently published by Apple’s engineers looking at how well LLMs (Large Language Models), the heart of AI systems like ChatGPT, and asking about their ability to deliver mathematical reasoning. They conclude that they are not ready for prime time right now. To illustrate the issue, TechCrunch gave this example: Let’s say…

I just picked up several interesting reports. The first is McKinsey’s review of Banking 2024. The good news? “The past two years have been the best for banking since before the Great Recession. Globally, banks generated $7 trillion in revenue and $1.1 trillion in net income, with return on tangible equity (ROTE) reaching 11.7 percent. Banks…

A year ago, a government commissioned report in the UK asked for a National Payments Vision and Strategy, or NPVS for short. Looking into this a year later, there does not seem to be much action. The report was produced by Joe Garner, founder of a start-up in the dot.com boom, a director at the…

I remember companies like Gartner and Forrester predicting that there would be a trillion dollar market in online sales by 2020 back in the 1990s. Now we are in 2024, it’s a three trillion dollar market, and so I thought it might be interesting to look at the various statistics being bandied about by firms…

Thinking about the Big Tech firms, most of them are enabling commerce. Amazon and Apple are building specific structures to make buying and selling easy. But one company is enabling fraud, scams and criminal activities. Meta. Meta runs Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as many other ventures from augmented reality to their X-like idea…

I just stumbled across a leap in the world. Cordless charging. Forget your cables, everything is now just charged through the air or by putting something onto a wireless charging point. It’s called induction charging and you’ve probably already used it. You put your phone down on a mouse-mat sort of base, and it starts…