Future

I was invited to a conference this week and given the title of the talk as: “Why there’s a very real danger that SEPA may not happen”. As a good European who believes in the PSD and SEPA, I declined to discuss this and invited my long-time acquaintance Sir Jonathan Brit to speak on my…

I've seen a couple of bits of commentary in the past week about the City of London losing its strength, namely: City's dominance in doubt (Telegraph) London Ponders Its Future as Financial Powerhouse (New York Times) During the boom years of the 2000s, London competed with Frankfurt and New York to become the financial centre…

I've seen a couple of bits of commentary in the past week about the City of London losing its strength, namely: City's dominance in doubt (Telegraph) London Ponders Its Future as Financial Powerhouse (New York Times) During the boom years of the 2000s, London competed with Frankfurt and New York to become the financial centre…

There have been various arguments about Twitter in the last few months and whether the alerts tool is useful or not. I started one debate a while ago and now there is another one (maybe). First, let me set the record straight before folks think I'm a puritanically obsessed Twitterati. At a personal level, I…

After my blog about the multichannel myth last week, it made me realise that banks need to become cannibals. Banks should launch new channels that eat their old ones alive, rather than trying to bolt these new channels onto their old bank. Banks can only be brilliant at one channel – the branch, the call…

It's easy to catch people's prediction out in hindsight, with the most common ones being things like "I see a worldwide market for about five computers" from Thomas Watson, IBM's CEO in the 1950s, and "640k is enough memory for anyone" from Bill Gates. Now there's a website dedicated to collecting these predictions called "Wrong…

It's easy to catch people's prediction out in hindsight, with the most common ones being things like "I see a worldwide market for about five computers" from Thomas Watson, IBM's CEO in the 1950s, and "640k is enough memory for anyone" from Bill Gates. Now there's a website dedicated to collecting these predictions called "Wrong…

I've blogged regularly, predicting that video connectivity will revolutionse banking.  In particular, it changes the game because face-to-face comes back as a critical differentiator, but also because I will be able to see directly into the back office, the call centre, the heart of bank operations. Right now, banks don't take it that seriously and…

Zopa announced results this week that showed lending had risen 140 percent year on year. In short, Zopa offers a lean and mean, razor thin margin system for loans.  As an lender, I enter Zopa and place an amount – let’s say $10,000 – in the system. Zopa then spreads that loan across a range of borrowers…