Future

I was watching The Apprentice the other night, and the task was to create a children’s bank for 6-9 year olds. The contestants had to work together to create an app and piggy bank, and then pitch it to senior investors from Go Henry, Monzo and TSB. It was a disaster. In fact, the team…

We just had the annual Oscar jamboree and congratulations to Anora for its five Oscars, and particular respect to Sean Baker who picked up four personally, something that’s never been achieved before. But Hollywood has an issue. No one knows where the money goes. I’ve just joined some friends to fix that. It came around…

Microsoft just unveiled a new chip called Majorana1 that it says will enable the creation of quantum computers able to solve “meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades”. Two months ago Google unveiled Willow, a chip that “can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits” and can process a computation “in under five minutes…

I find times interesting, as so many fintechs had an amazing ride in the 2010s but, in the 2020s, it seems not. Fintech took a hammering in 2023 with investing down 48% compared to 2022, which was also a bad year … … and now we move into 2025 and reflect on 2024 where it…

After many years we have had many discussions of many countries and many banks talking about launching many central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Today, only three countries have a live CBDC: the Bahamas, Jamaica and Nigeria. Doesn’t that feel a bit strange? Well, most governments are experimenting with CBDCs and SWIFT, to retain their control…

Almost every day these days is an AI headline, but this video really struck me. It is showing the selfies we would have taken in historical times: Can you imagine? The reason it struck me is that you have to wonder today what is real online and what is not. The more our networked system…

I shared a post the other day by Usman Sheikh, a serial investor based in Dubai. The post is asking the question whether AI can replace consultants although, to be more pointed, specifically McKinsey. How could that happen? McKinsey have the best and brightest minds in the world: they only hire graduates at the top of…

In an excellent article on LinkedIn, Priscilla Russo laments the state of Agentic AI from a payments point of view. Bearing in mind that 2025 is the year of Agentic AI – a world where AI agents do everything for you on your behalf – it is clear that we have a dichotomy between the open…

A quantum financial system, or QFS for short Maybe it’s the way my feeds are set up, but every day seems like a headline about cryptocurrency and AI these days. Take my daily things worth reading, and here’s a few examples just from last Monday. On crypto: Trump orders crypto working group to draft new…

I feel like a continual splurge of Musk is happening, ever since Donald Trump became President, but the latest is really interesting as Elon Musk is now in control of the Treasury department payments system that runs America. According to The Washington Post, longtime Treasury official David Lebryk is “expected to leave the agency soon”, despite…