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You’ve been thinking about cryptocurrencies all wrong. Every few months someone declares that cryptocurrency is dead. In fact, there’s a website dedicated to recording every one of those predictions. The latest panic is bitcoin’s price falling below $65,000 and Coinbase reporting weaker revenues. A few months earlier everyone was predicting Bitcoin would hit $200,000. Before…

This week’s main blog discussions include … PayPal, Stripe and Adyen: three companies, three futures Back in 2021, PayPal was worth around $360 billion. Today it is worth closer to $50 billion. That’s one of the biggest destructions of market value we’ve seen in fintech, and yet it isn’t because the company stopped growing. Quite…

Back in 2021, PayPal was worth around $360 billion. Today it is worth closer to $50 billion. That’s one of the biggest destructions of market value we’ve seen in fintech, and yet it isn’t because the company stopped growing. Quite the opposite. PayPal still moves almost $2 trillion every year, serves around 440 million active…

For decades we’ve assumed that technology would make markets more efficient. It has. What we perhaps didn’t anticipate is that it would also make theft, lies and deceit dramatically more efficient. This is illustrated by three completely unrelated stories that caught my attention this week. One examined how consumers are abusing chargeback rules through “friendly…

One person in seven has no access to formal financial services. One person in six lives with a disability. We normally think of these as two separate inclusion challenges. They are not. They are the same problem. Financial systems were designed around a single type of customer, leaving millions of others behind. For decades, financial…

For centuries, we’ve designed the world for the able-bodied and called everyone else disabled. Today, technology is quietly rewriting those rules. It is making finance, communication, work and everyday life adapt to people, rather than forcing people to adapt to systems. Increasingly, I think disability tells us less about the individual than it does about…

For decades, we’ve treated poverty as an economic problem. Increasingly, I think it’s a technology problem. That sounds like a strange statement until you realise that the single biggest driver of financial inclusion over the past fifty years has not been governments, charities or banks. It has been technology. Governments, banks and charities have spent…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Banks exist because trust doesn’t scale Some days, the financial news seems to have nothing whatsoever in common but yesterday there were four stories where I saw a link. The first is a US senator demanding answers from Barclays over Jes Staley’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Then there…

Some days, the financial news seems to have nothing whatsoever in common but yesterday there were four stories where I saw a link. The first is a US senator demanding answers from Barclays over Jes Staley’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Then there are UK banks are facing political scrutiny for restricting customers from making crypto…

Building on my story about banks win wars, not soldiers, there have been two interesting headlines over the last week: Half a million Russians go bankrupt as Putin risks banking crisis Russians turn to cash putting more strain on slowing wartime economy The stories boil down to the fact that the Russian economy is bust….