Future

I have often written about how the developing world is leap-frogging the developed world. The reason is that the developing world had no infrastructure in place whilst the developed world implemented their infrastructure in the last century. The developed world has become a legacy world. The developing world is a …

Looking beyond 2020, there has been a rise of quite a number of folks looking to the longer-term future. Here’s the key ones I’ve picked up on so far. First is Royal Bank of Canada with their Imagine 2025 series. Quite an investment and lots of interviews and insights. The …

As a regular BA traveller, I’m always pleased to pick up their magazine Business Life as it often has some interesting articles. This year, the magazine has a great write up of forecasts for things that will happen in the 2020s by Tim Hulse. Here are his top 10 things …

I was going to write stuff about this but The Financial Stability Board did it for me. Here’s where the regulator will focus in 2020: The Financial Stability Board (FSB) published its work programme for 2020. The FSB’s work priorities for 2020 reflect the evolving nature of the global financial …

Start of a New Year and there are websites everywhere making predictions on everything from elections to economies. I used to write my own predictions but honestly cannot be bothered anymore when you have 1,000 other people doing it. Instead, I’ve hand-picked some of my favourite predictions made out there …

Welcome to 2020. It’s a new day. It’s a new year. It’s a new decade. And yes, I’m feeling good. 2020. This is a year all of us futurists have looked forward to for over two decades as, back in 2000, it became popular to talk about a 2020 vision. …

As it’s Friday the Thirteenth I thought I’d cheer you up with yet another core systems renewal story. There’s a great article that resonated with me in the Financial Times the other day, talking about ‘technical debt‘. The line that has stayed with me is this one: “Stripe estimates that …

An interesting lunch discussion about data the other day. It started when someone had picked up on my blog about Ana Botin, where she made the comment: “Why should data be regulated in a different way if you’re called a bank and if you’re called something else … more than two …

I’ve blogged many times that so called free banking is a fallacy.  It’s something I have blogged about for a decade, and the recurring theme is free banking should be banned by the regulator as it’s only free as long as you don’t go overdrawn. The result is that the …

I’ve noted that the bitcoin swings and roundabouts tend to often cycle around the hope and expectation of the US SEC giving approval to a bitcoin ETF … only to find that they never do and so it goes around. In an interesting article by Dave Weisberger on Coindesk, there …

I’ve said on a number of occasions recently that banking and finance is at the heart of the climate crisis. Banks provide the financing for fossil fuel firms who are destroying the planet. The key numbers: Coal supplies a third of all energy worldwide, with the top coal consumers and producers in 2018 being China, …

Building on my discussion yesterday about offshore tax havens and decentralisation to avoid governance in both the physical and virtual world, there’s a more fundamental issue at large here. Tax avoidance. Some people hear the words “a tax” and interpret it as “attacks”. I heard a figure the other day …

People were surprised to see a headline that garnered much market shock: Markets Crash after reports that Binances Shangai Office Closed in Crypto Crackdown Argh. Crypto meltdown! I was amused to see a headline that garnered much online mirth: Markets Crash after reports that Binances Shangai Office Closed in Crypto …

In the last month, there’s been a wave of announcements from Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon about banking. We’ve seen Facebook’s major activities in trying to create a digital currency called Libra, and Apple’s move into finance with a credit card from Goldman Sachs which, in just a month, offered …

I just saw an interesting report produced and released by SIX Group that talks about the future of money.  SIX Group run payments and settlement processing out of Switzerland and, unsurprisingly, their view is that the most likely future is that there will be digital everything but still some cash …