Chris Skinner's blog

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The long and winding road … to the blockchain

I still talk a lot about blockchain, distributed ledgers, cryptocurrencies and more, but often feel it’s falling on deaf ears. The price of bitcoin flies around in the $7,000 a coin bracket, having risen from a tenth of that amount a year ago; and many people talk about blockchain and distributed ledger interchangeably, as did…

Does digital transformation actually matter?

I regularly talk about BBVA (Spain) and DBS (Singapore) as banks that are doing the right things for digital transformation. They both started early, have a leadership team who are committed and have been driving down this road with results. Results in terms of awards and recognition within the technology community, but what about in…

Digital democratisation

I was in a conversation with a regulator about bank competition, and they wondered how I saw banks changing. In particular, they were concerned about collegiate – read that as bank cartels – actions by the banks to protect their own interests. I thought about it and said that I did not believe that banks…

Throwing technology over the wall

I was listening to someone talking about monolith versus microservices structures recently, and they likened it to an old car versus a new one. Old cars were made of metal and welded together into a solid machine where, if any part breaks, you have to replace the whole machine. The machine is unwieldy, slow and…

Will Sweden be the first cashless country?

As Sweden was the first European country to use cash for payments back in 1661, it’s unsurprising that it’s the first European country that wants to be cashless. This is why, for several years, I’ve been watching the regular speeches by Lars Nyberg, Deputy Governor of the Sweden’s central bank, the Riksbank, talking about eradicating…

Wake up and smell the Dodo

It’s intriguing to see how people react to my presentations. I am direct, some call me blunt, but my content is based upon deep research that mixes desk-based analysis, my blog, endless conversations around the world with bankers and technologists and a lot of experience. I’m not saying others are wrong, but I know I’m…

Preparing for the Coming Crypto Revolution

Today, I received a guest post from David Demar, cryptocurrency disciple, author and a writer for NoStop.net. I really liked what he sent through and thought it worth a share as it complements quite a bit of what I’ve covered in the last week.  Enjoy! Preparing for the Coming Crypto Revolution Much has been made of…

Answering the hardest questions in the world

I recently stumbled across a marketing campaign being run by UBS, which tries to answer the hardest questions in the world. The questions cover everything from equality to politics and, to illustrate what they are debating, here are a few examples: Why is there such a big gap between the richest and the poorest? (UBS is…

One brilliant thing is way better than 1000 average ones

I’ve blogged on some of the themes I’m going to cover below, but the story gets clearer and clearer in my head the more I blog about and talk about it, so this version may be a little clearer than some that have gone before. The first is that banks organisational structures have to move…

The next ten years of technology from Gartner and Skinner

I just spotted that Gartner have made a series of ten bold predictions for IT 2018 and beyond. They are summarised nicely by Forbes and are: By 2021, early adopter brands that redesign their websites to support visual- and voice-search will increase digital commerce revenue by 30%. Gartner has found that voice-based search queries are the…

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