We had a great debate at the Financial Services Club last night, picking up on that perennial debating point: do banks need branches? In the pro-branch corner were Anthony Thomson, co-founder of Metrobank and Ron Whatford, former Chief Experience Officer with Lloyds Banking Group; in the anti-branch corner were Mark Mullen, CEO of First Direct…
The world is a wonderful place, as times shift fast and things turn faster than an egg on a timer. Just as you get used to one technology, another comes along and turns things on its head. What technology do we mean? NFC. Near Field Communication. No Flippin' Chance. The more I think about NFC, the…
I’m speaking at a conference on the future of payments today for one of the world’s largest suppliers of payments terminals. They asked me my views on the future of the point-of-sale, and I said that it would disappear. Not a good position to take when you’re the keynote speaker at a conference for a…
Whilst consumers are electing the next major political leader via crowdsourced populism, governments and companies begin developing cyberarms. This cyberwarfare is already rife, with a host of malware targeting middle eastern nations (see end of blog entry). What is obvious from these developments is that cyberattacks are the new form of warfare that evades direct…
I spent some time contemplating history last week, and realised just how many times we have been through moments like this. The Civil War in Britain; the storming of the Bastille in France; the Russian Revolution; the themes of many German philosophers during the 1800s, such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche; and more. Throughout…
After the LIBOR debacle and the money laundering affairs of Standard Chartered and HSBC, the UK’s banks reputation are in the toilet. Now we have to rebuild, and this is where it gets interesting and challenging. After claiming that the Americans were holding our banks to ransom last week, we now see the potentially true…
I’ve blogged a lot about the history of the City of London, but what about its future? Right now, we could all imagine there won’t be one, but there is. It’s just going to be different. Now, I could speculate on the wholesale restructuring of British Banking and British bank regulations, as that’s definitely going…
