Future

I’ve pretty much been travelling the world on business non-stop for thirty years, and something has fundamentally changed during that period.  Obviously, the internet and mobile and global connectivity, but also the homogeneity of globalisation.  I remember flying into Singapore’s brand spanking new Changi Airport in 1987 and my disappointment at being greeted by McDonald’s. …

I was chatting with a friend about what he’s up to these days.  He started talking earnestly about looking up his family ancestry.  With the internet these days, you can quickly find your grandparents, great grandparents, great-great grandparents and even your birth mother.  He had traced some parts of his lineage to the 1600s in…

It’s a decade since the iPhone launched.  Steve Jobs unveiled the new phone on January 9th, 2007. The first iPhones were made available to the grubby hands of the public on June 29th, 2007, exactly ten years ago today.  This was originally just for American consumers with the UK, France, and Germany following in November…

I was going to blog about something different, when I spotted this article in The Financial Times about Klarna gaining a banking license over the weekend (thanks to Pascal Bouvier).  The commentary has two key sentences, which I’ve highlighted, that illustrate all the things I have been saying about Banking-as-a-Service and curated marketplaces brilliantly, namely: Banking becomes…

After my blog yesterday, about banks having to move from being control freaks in a proprietary operation building everything to becoming collaborative partners in an open marketplace curating everything, I was asked: “how do you make money out of curation?” It’s a good question, as marketplace curators make money very differently from proprietary product providers. …

I regularly blog about the same subject, namely CHANGE YOUR CORE SYSTEMS.  Banks do a great job of not listening to me, but that’s because they’ve caught themselves in Catch 22: screwed if I change them and screwed if I don’t.  How did they get into this mess and how can they get out of…

I thought I’d wait until after the weekend to write a post about the implications of the UK election results.  It’s not my place to write about the pros and cons of the election campaigns, although I will say that the alienation of the elderly and those who are parents by the Conservative’s campaign –…

Twenty years ago, I was working on re-engineering projects.  Most of the time I was getting exasperated because the banks wouldn’t take on the big projects, like the mortgage process, as it went across too many divisions.  That’s big risk in their view, as it meant disturbing the structure of the organisation.  So, we would…

Someone made an interesting comment about Google this week: banks can attack Google’s soft underbelly. What? Google? Soft underbelly? And banks can attack it? You must be joking. The presenter (Conor McAleavey, Chief Innovatoin Officer with Leveris) went on to outline what he meant and, as he talked about it, I thought there may be…

I’m hearing murmurs of a financial crisis rising again.  It’s just rumours and gossip, but sometimes there’s no smoke without fire.  My forecast for another major global financial crisis was that it wouldn’t occur until the 2040s but, as James Dimon noted, a financial crisis generally appears around every seven years.  Not a big one,…