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I wanted to expand on my theory of a third technology revolution. The first technological revolution was the mainframe. It automated core administrative processing between back and front office. It is the infrastructure that built SWIFT, Visa and MasterCard. It’s the core platform of most banks, with almost half of them running on COBOL mainframe…

I take pride in how many things I’ve predicted in payments and finance. that have come true from Digital Banking to cloud to BaaS to crypto and more, but I didn’t predict a lot of things, such as the financial crisis of 2008, the sovereign debt crisis that followed and the pandemic that came after…

This week’s main discussions include … Those who built our digital world are digging our graves Just stumbled across an update from Stephen Klein, one of the leading voices on LinkedIn. He wrote a fascinating update about how the digital billionaires are insuring themselves for the possible impact of an apocalypse and are spending billions on…

Just stumbled across an update from Stephen Klein, one of the leading voices on LinkedIn. He wrote a fascinating update about how the digital billionaires are insuring themselves for the possible impact of an apocalypse and are spending billions on this. Mark Zuckerberg has spent millions on a compound in Hawaii that covers 1,400 acres. Underground tunnels…

I started a theme two years ago, in prep for the next new book, about how we can trust people digitally. In a deep fake world, we cannot. A good example is the Hong Kong staffer who transferred $25m to an account after talking with her deep fake CFO in a video call. The critical…

I really hate subscription services online. There are many that automatically renew without me knowing and, even worse, there are those that you sign up to without even knowing. A good example is one I discovered on my bank account the other day. Apparently I had signed up for a service that costs £3:00 a…

As usual, clicking over LinkedIn, I got a chart that made me sit back and smile a bit. What chart? This one: Source: Brice Groche, LinkedIn The chart outlines the revenue models of Europe’s digital finance firms, and what it made me realise is the big difference in strategies of challenger banks and start-ups. When…

Half a century ago, people thought that the average person wouldn’t remember a six-digit PIN*. A quarter century later, we got usernames and passwords by the bucketload. Now, we have so many loads of buckets, each of which are meant to have their own individual access codes, none of which we can remember, that the…

This week’s main discussions include … What is an Intelligent Bank? I keep thinking about what an Intelligent Bank means. What is an Intelligent Bank? Well, strip it back to basics. An Intelligent Bank is a bank that is so embedded and intimate with my digital finance that it can predict what I should do,…

A news item arrived in my inbox describing the rise of internet and social media usage worldwide. It specifically reports which countries are using the internet the most. I somewhat disagree with the results, but it is interesting to see the ranking. According to their research, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) ranks as the #1…