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Shaping the future of finance

Future

The economic outlook for the next few years is …

I was lucky enough to be invited to a conference of the great and the good managing one of the large economies of Europe the other day. It was in a fine location, with lots of dignitaries, media coverage, security guards and German shepherds. On that last point, the dogs, not guys herding sheep. Anyways,…

Who owns the data? Who’s in control?

I find life interesting. Themes recur over and over and over again. Will big banks survive? When will we, will we be cashless? Oh when, will we, will be branchless? Can we really replace the City with a trading network of algorithms? And more. One of my favourite recurring themes is when will we have…

Time for a global regulator

I was in conversation with a banker the other day and we got around to regulations and regulators, as many conversations with banks tend to do. There were some interesting reflections in that dialogue, however. I guess it falls into three categories: the way regulations used to be; the way they are; the way they…

Time for a global FinTech platform?

I find it interesting when I read perspectives on FinTech, money and banking. Going digital, getting rid of branches, becoming cashless seem to be the main themes, and yet this ignores that every part of the world is different. It’s hard to go digital if the country has little infrastructure; it doesn’t make sense to…

UPDATE: The Blockchain Hype is Dead!

For those fooled by yesterday’s spoof news about Alipay and Visa, did you notice it was April 1? If not, you should have clicked the link in the blog. Talking about spoof news, I think my blog Blockchain is dead upset a few blockchain enthusiasts. Don’t get me wrong, as it’s not me saying blockchain is…

Alipay and Visa announce global QR code venture

UPDATE: THIS BLOG POST WAS AN APRIL FOOL! We all got hugely excited about Apple launching a credit card with Goldman Sachs and Mastercard last week. Whoopy-doo! This was a major lift for Mastercard in particular. As Wedbush’s Moshe Katri noted payments on the card will be processed by Mastercard using “Mastercard’s token and M-chip…

If banks provide no advice, what do they provide?

For many years, banks have talked about moving away from transactions and towards advice. The branch is for advice. We will become trusted advisors. We see the value-add of banking is the information we can analyse around your data to offer advice. Complete rubbish. I’m sorry, but I’ve towed that line for a long time…

Women in FinTech … yes, we care

So, I blogged last week about women in FinTech and whether we care, and got lots of replies … from women … who said yes, we care. Interesting that there were not so many replies from the other gender, but hey what do you expect? One interesting insight is that the future of work will…

Will Facebook become the world’s central bank?

I got a large number of pings over the weekend to read and comment on an article on Medium by Lance Ng headlined: Facebook Plans to Become World’s Biggest Central Bank? It is a conjectured article that takes the story from The New York Times discussing Facebook creating its own cryptocurrency (Facebook and Telegram Are…

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