Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

Future

Reboot the bank’s boardroom NOW!

Bye bye banking job for life Many of the banking folk I meet have been with the bank as man and boy, woman and girl.  It’s a job for life.  Funnily enough, I’ve never known one of those jobs.  I guess it’s because I work in tech, and many of the tech firms I’ve worked…

Which digital currency will win: bitcoin or ether?

I’m a big fan of Kraken, the digital currency exchange in California, as it’s my main exchange for investing in digital assets.  If you want to know more, checkout their general overview at the end of this blog.  I’m also a fan of their blog, which regularly sends me interesting stuff and they’ve just launched…

Look at financial inclusion for innovation

I guess in concluding this weeks’ thoughts, I’m left reflecting on a similar idea to the one I blogged a couple of weeks ago about a world turned on its head.  This time it’s a different take on the same conundrum.  We live in the developed economies complaining about legacy; developing economies are just excited…

Who’s going to win the US election?

Today is the US election and what a terrible choice they have.  You would think out of 320 million people to choose from, that they could have come up with a better two than these two.  Anyway, I’m not American and it’s not my position to comment on these things, but I did pick up…

A glimpse into the future, last part: space money

A final thought on the future from a banking perspective.  So we will be colonizing Mars by 2040 according to Elon Musk.  Why?  Because this planet is not going to sustain the population it has emerging.  When I was born there were half the number of people on Earth that there are today.  Some say…

A glimpse into the future, part five: space

Well, finally we get to the part of this series I’ve been looking forward to writing about the most: space.  No longer the final frontier as we’re conquering space fast.  From landing explorers on Mars to capturing amazing images of Pluto, we have begun our journey to boldly go where no one has gone before. …

A glimpse into the future, part four: the internet of everything

I’ve talked often and in depth about the internet of things and how this affects banking.  In the near future, when each of us has five, six, eight, ten things on the internet, we will be seeing a world where trillions of transactions take place amongst billions of things in real-time, not-stop and in very small…

A glimpse of the future, part three: the internet of things

We talk a lot about the Internet of Things (IoT) and have been for a while.  Most of us probably don’t see much of it yet.  OK, so we have a smartphone but what other smart things do you have?  Maybe if you’re in America, you have NEST, Alexa and a Tesla, so you’ve get…

A glimpse of the future, part two – 70 is the new 30

As mentioned yesterday, there’s a big question about what all of this means for financial service.  You may not have asked those questions but if life sciences allows people to live for 150 years or more; if babies can be born without defects; if you can design yourself to be whatever you want to be;…

A glimpse of the future, part one

I know I talk about banking and technology most of the time, but I also have other topics of interest.  Art, history, travel, fine wine … although I obviously look at them all from a banker’s point of view and wonder what it’s worth. All that said, one of the biggest areas of surprise in…