Future

OK, OK, OK. I said this blog is not political, but it’s got a bit that way this week after my comments on HSBC and Standard Chartered, China and Hong Kong. In fact, I feel I’ve opened a bag of hornets and therefore I’m not going to continue this theme further … but do feel…

I got an amazing reply to my post yesterday. I cannot say from whom – that’s part of the thing – but it’s such a good reply, I’m sharing it here. For me, it shows how the internet has changed the world – I can write a blog from Poland, get a reply from Hong…

I keep saying that I don’t want to be political on this blog – I’m not qualified and it’s not why you read it – but, as a human being, I cannot ignore things like Black Lives Matter, the lockdown approaches of different countries, the suppression of religious groups, the wars that continue (especially in…

During my MoneyBox interview about Wirecard (see end of this blog), Paul asked me the question: how could this happen again? What’s next? And I said, we learn from our mistakes. Progress never stops. Wirecard won’t shut down FinTech. It will amend it. This means this is not the end of Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS), but an…

Some of us are old enough to remember Arthur Anderson and Enron, a mixture of two companies that created an accounting mess bigger than any seen before in corporate history. That was until Ernst & Young (EY) and Wirecard. Interestingly, there have been many auditing mess ups in the past few decades, but there are…

Another day and another headline about Wirecard: ‘The money’s gone’: Wirecard collapses owing $4 billion Wirecard’s Missing Billions Forces Out CEO, Panics Lenders Wirecard: Former boss arrested over €1.9bn scandal How Wirecard fooled most of the people all of the time Inside Wirecard EY failed to ask for Wirecard bank statements for 3 years Softbank…

There are lots of ways in which FinTech is changing the world, and the one we love to discuss the most is financial inclusion. The figures stun me. Over a billion people have been banked in the last decade, according to the World Bank. 69 percent of adults – 3.8 billion people – now have…

Forbes just launched a list of the world’s best banks, based upon a survey of over 40,000 consumers in partnership with Statista. I’m always wary of such surveys as, like influencer lists, they often reflect the world they want and miss a lot of what’s really happening. Nevertheless, there are some interesting comments in the dialogue…

I got hauled up the other day by someone who thought I was very insensitive in blogging about this crisis as an economic one, but not a catastrophic one. What I actually wrote was (I’ve amended it slightly since): Someone wrote the other day that this pandemic is like a world war. It’s not. A world…

I was having a bit of ding-dong over my article about the coronavirus pandemic being perfectly predictable and not a black swan. There are many who believe the reaction to the pandemic is a black swan, as in the lockdown of Planet Earth. Hmmm … what reaction did we think we would have to a…