Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

Future

The Global Consortium for Digital Currency Governance

I said you’re probably sick of Davos but one last update. On Friday a major announcement affecting all of banking and finance globally seeped out under the radar. I spotted it. Did you? Here it is … World Economic Forum Announces Global Consortium for Digital Currency Governance Today, the World Economic Forum announces the first…

Fed up with talk of a climate emergency?

You’ve probably heard all you need to hear about Davos by now, so I won’t bore you with it much further … except for this. Much of the dialogue for the past year has been about climate change or climate emergency or climate action or whatever you want to call it. Between David Attenborough, Greta…

A Davos Day

I’ve watched Davos from afar for years now and often wondered what it would be like to be there so, when I got an invite this year, I took it straight away. The United Nations Media Group asked if I could join them and talk about sustainable finance, which I did. A short clip here:…

What is the purpose of a bank?

It’s a simple question: what is the purpose of a bank? However, the answers I get are often missing the mark, imho. I get answers like to fund business, to finance progress, to support government, to keep economies stable, to manage risk, to build communities, to allow people to be secure, to enable trade and…

The West Asian Renaissance: Watch and Learn

I sometimes write a reflective blog post or two and realised that the vision of the West Asian nations – some call this The Middle East, but that’s not right – is quite stunning. The aim is to move from their dependency on oil, and become self-supporting nations using new funding and new ideas to…

China and India in 2020: Watch and Learn

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 world fit for today. First…

To 2020 … and beyond

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 main report talks about six…

2020: a decade in technology

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 for the next decade. 1…

The regulator’s focus for 2020

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 system and associated risks to…

2020 technologies – the year of SD-WAN, PIE and 5G

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 by other people. Seeking Alpha…