Future

There are a few countries / continents where innovation is rife. In Africa, mobile payments are transforming the continent. In Japan, mobile internet banking is changing their world. And in Spain, social finance is top of the agenda. Last year, I noted that BBVA had launched the first Web 2.0 …

I heard this quote the other day and loved it, so I’m using it (nothing like plagiarism is there?). Equally, I’m stealing lots of other things these days, such as this animation sent to me courtesy of Simon Deane-Johns: If you are using a system that has a Firewall and …

I heard this quote the other day and loved it, so I’m using it (nothing like plagiarism is there?). Equally, I’m stealing lots of other things these days, such as this animation sent to me courtesy of Simon Deane-Johns: If you are using a system that has a Firewall and …

There are wide differences of opinion between different banks of the role of a branch these days. Is a branch a branch, a store, a transactional centre, a sales centre, a retail lobby, an automated machine or all of these things or none of them? On the one hand, I …

As we use low latency systems, faster payments, twitter and other technologies, we silently watch the revolution of our world from local to global communities, and to a real-time global pulse. The thing is, do you ever stop to notice? The fact that you can trade in a millionth of …

Last year, I wrote an extensive piece about a vision of trading in the future based upon 24*7 real-time global markets and the impact of news algorithmics.  A key piece of that article was the idea of water being a rare commodity and hence of very high value. Traders globally …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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. …

We're about to take an Easter holiday and so I thought I would leave you with food for thought until Tuesday. There are some fascinating ideas floating around about this crisis over the last six months: from nationalise all banks to hang all bankers; from the collapse of capitalism to …

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 …

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 …

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 …