Shaping the future of finance
It’s SIBOS week and so lots of research and news announcements. Two caught my attention though, as I always look forward to what McKinsey and Cap Gemini are saying in their payments reports. The both tell the same story from different angles, namely that the payment is disappearing. Not disappearing in the sense that we…
We have spent the last few years obsessing over artificial intelligence that sits in front of the customer – chatbots that summarise documents, copilots that draft emails, and interfaces that appear to know everything. But finance does not run on language. It runs on transactions, cash flows, liquidity, risk and trust. After spending time examining…
For many years, McKinsey has been the go-to firm for advice and Gartner for research but, with AI, why bother? In fact, there is a lot of debate about whether AI will replace consultants and research firms such as McKinsey and Gartner. The thing is that this conversation misses the bigger change. What’s that? It…
I spotted a fascinating post from Stephany Kirkpatrick on LinkedIn that gets straight to the heart of one of the biggest opportunities and failures facing wealth management today. Stephany is a successful founder and entrepreneur who founded Orum in 2019, sold it to Stripe in 2025 and has now started another venture called Pretty Smart…
This week’s main blog discussions include … What’s really happening with Nubank? Nubank wants to go global but not like Revolut. Everyone assumes Nubank wants to be like the next Revolut. They’re wrong. Revolut wants to build one financial superapp for the world. Nubank is building something different: a global banking empire that does not…
Nubank wants to go global but not like Revolut. Everyone assumes Nubank wants to be like the next Revolut. They’re wrong. Revolut wants to build one financial superapp for the world. Nubank is building something different: a global banking empire that does not require Nubank to be the bank. That sounds like a subtle distinction,…
The interesting story is no longer simply whether bitcoin goes to $50,000, $100,000 or $500,000, but whether the technologies created around crypto are becoming the foundations of a new financial system. If that is right, it raises a much bigger question: what is the money in that system? For most of our lives, the answer…
I just did an interview with LVTX about the future of payments. Sharing it here, fyi: What is one of the biggest structural inefficiencies in the payments and financial services ecosystem that still hasn’t been solved? One of the biggest structural inefficiencies in financial services today isn’t payments or settlement. It’s digital trust. The fact…
We have spent thirty years building an internet that is extraordinarily good at moving information and increasingly good at moving money, but remarkably bad at establishing who or what is on the other side of an interaction. The result is that we compensate with passwords, usernames, security questions, one-time codes, passport scans, selfies, cookies, device…
You are reading this as your data is harvested. On average, your personal data is collected 271 times a day. I know who you are. I know what you are doing. I will look for you. I will find you. Most of us think surveillance involves CCTV cameras, governments, police databases and, perhaps, the slightly…
