Grid

On my LinkedIn stream, I’ve been getting more and more alerts about malpractices at Stripe. That surprises me as they are the poster child of fintech, so I investigated and found that most of my feed was being filled by one Brad Harrington, a young self-employed entrepreneur who graduated from the University of Michigan in…

Building on my recent blogs about Don Tramp’s love of crypto, he has now allegedly launched a joint meme coin with Vlamadir Punit, a Ruskian. The meme coin is called Pump, a reference to Punit and Tramp. Little was known about the background to the coin until it was launched this morning but, in a…

I got hauled up for being a Musk hater the other day which, to be clear, I am not. It’s purely that he is the richest man in the world and the most powerful, even more powerful than Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, so the media hate him. As we are fed daily media updates…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Bank IT outages … let’s talk about the bank systems Jenga I’ve been talking a lot about bank IT outages lately, as you can hear here on the BBC! Tech Life – Surviving digital banking outages – BBC Sounds Why? Because they are becoming more and more common and…

I just downloaded the Chainalysis annual cryptocrime report and, as usual, it is fascinating. Ask almost any politician or banker about cryptocurrencies and they’ll say they all encourage crime except Donald Trump, but that’s because he is supposedly a criminal. Here is a synopsis of the report taken from their introduction: According to our metrics…

I’ve seen a number of companies die over they years. Sometimes it’s a statement from the CEO showing arrogance but, more often, from a mistake in strategy. After all, it’s easy to make a comment and miss the mark; it’s even easier to make a strategic movement and miss the mark. Therefore, the recent dumping…

I’ve been talking a lot about bank IT outages lately, as you can hear here on the BBC! Tech Life – Surviving digital banking outages – BBC Sounds Why? Because they are becoming more and more common and frequent: Big bank systems crashed for over 800 hours in last two years due to IT outages More…

It’s funny that I’m blogging so much about trust and identity, but that seems to be the theme of the year. So when I saw the new release of the Financial Conduct Authority’s five-year vision I was struck by the Chair’s opening page, which is all about trust. Ashley Alder writes: “When financial services are strong…

Cryptoassets, smart contracts, stablecoins, tokenisation and the two different types of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) – retail CBDCs and wholesale CBDCs. The world of finance and technology is quite confusing. Add onto this AI, APIs, BNPL, blockchain (Layer 1 and Layer 2), DLT [distributed-ledger technology], machine learning and more, and you get the idea….

Been having lots of conversations about digital identities and digital wallets lately. It is a theme that has been bubbling for years, yet seem to now be coming to a head. From the EU Digital Wallet and Identity program to India’s Aadhaar and UPI to Brazil’s Pix, there’s definitely something afoot. The core of the…