Future

Commonwealth Bank of Australia put this video onto YouTube the other day: It's a vision of 2013.  Come back here in three years and see if it's come true! I'm fairly sure that, if it is, then this is how you'll be getting to work (thanks to Barclaycard): Cool!  

With so much hullabaloo about banker's bonus taxes, taxes on liabilities, a return to narrow banking, the closure of leveraged prop trading, bankers versus Obama, Sarkozy and Davos, you might miss a few key changes in emphasis. For example, the bankers view as demonstrated by Bob Diamond's comments yesterday: 'World …

Everyone's getting real excited about Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, and his new payments application for the iPhone called Square. If you haven't seen it, here it is: In a lengthy interview with Pymnts.com, Dorsey says:  "We can provide a lot of things that I think have been missing …

I’ve been noticing more and more apps for providing information about our environment. Known as augmented reality – rather than artificial reality where you go into a completely fictitious world – the use of such services is increasing rapidly. A good example is the SkyMap app on the Google Android mobile: Simply holding up …

After West Side Story, the Sharks got over the Jets and are now targeting the Gorillas. Actually nothing to do with music or film, we’re talking banks. Back in the 1950s you had large banks (Sharks) being run around by small banks (Jets) who were nimbler and quicker … so …

After various predictions yesterday, including the return of Glass-Steagall and a Chinese bank buying an American or European one, today it’s the turn of technology. There are lots of questions about technology, such as: Will Google make us stupid? Will we live in the cloud or the desktop? Will social …

Each year, I try to start the year with a few predictions of what will happen.  Last year proved to be pretty accurate, although it was playing fairly safe. This year is fuzzier in outlook, with not a great deal of obvious trends emerging. But a few that seem likely …

After reviewing how my five predictions for 2009 did, I was fascinated to get a note from Business Week  with the ten worst predictions made for the year. Mine did not make the list, but my good friend Stephen Timewell from the Banker is on there: "In short, under the …

Back in January, I made five firm predictions for banking in 2009. Those predictions were: More major European and American banks disappear There will be some spectacular failures in the BRIC economies A Global Financial Regulatory Body is formed The US will drop IFRS Solvent banks gain major market share. …

There have been many attempts to create the branch of the future (Accenture, IBM, John Ryan … Deutsche Bank, Barclays Bank, Umpqua Bank …), and so I was intrigued to hear that Sberbank in Russia had made a major investment in creating a flagship branch in Moscow. I meant to …

Back in August, I blogged about the new generation of employee. This week, I joined a presentation with JP Rangaswami to talk about the impact of technology on our lives, and the subject of Gen Y and the new generation of staff came up again. For those of you who …

With the news that the cheque will end its life as a valid payments instrument in the UK on 31st October 2018, it's worth reminding all that it's not just old people who use them: But that the main usage is with businesses, who want to keep cheques. Because they …

In the final part of this discussion of risks and opportunities in CEE, I was asked to give a view (see if you can spot me).   So here’s my brief summary: What are the risks for the next year or two? First, we are still in the middle of …

We had our final meeting of the year for the Financial Services Club in Central & Eastern Europe (FSClub CEE) this week, with an excellent panel discussion about the risks and opportunities across the region looking forward.  This is almost a bookend to our opening FSClub CEE discussion of whether …

We had our final meeting of the year for the Financial Services Club in Central & Eastern Europe (FSClub CEE) this week, with an excellent panel discussion about the risks and opportunities across the region looking forward.  This is almost a bookend to our opening FSClub CEE discussion of whether …