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I just had an interesting and lengthy dialogue. After booking flights a while ago, the flight operator cancelled one leg of my flight. Instead of flying to Las Vegas for five nights via Frankfurt, I was now flying to Las Vegas for two nights and then back to my layover city Frankfurt for three nights….

I’ve felt European for most of my life, as the UK joined the EU back in 1973. Free travel and movement across borders, that grew from nine states to twenty eight, introduced a glorious period of open integration. Integration of trade and commerce and then, latterly, money and finance. The grand plan of the euro…

The last recession of any major size was 2008. Fourteen years ago! The iPhone had just appeared and we had just started discussions around the concept of cloud computing. Oh, and FinTech wasn’t even talked about. Fourteen years later, FinTech is getting over $200 billion investment a year, and the world has changed a lot….

The main blog discussions this week include … Is Goldman Sachs letting Apple down? There’s a good old challenge in banking that, in recent years, has been growing. The challenge is to name the bad guy. Sometimes the bad guy is a hacker; other days, it’s a rogue trader; another event points the finger at…

There’s a good old challenge in banking that, in recent years, has been growing. The challenge is to name the bad guy. Sometimes the bad guy is a hacker; other days, it’s a rogue trader; another event points the finger at an employee with a fat finger; but, more often than not, the bad guy…

What is the four-pillar model? It’s a system created years ago to allow plastic card systems to work. The system connects merchant to consumers via an acquiring bank and an issuing bank. Well, maybe it’s not that simple. Let’s let MasterCard explain it: What is interchange? Interchange is a small fee typically paid by acquirers (retailer’s…

We often talk about banking being plumbing, using smart pipes for delivery to the door. Some even comparing banking to sewage. I think I prefer plumbing. It sounds better. The thing is, how often do you think of changing your utility provider? Changing electricity, water and gas is not at the top of our agenda….

Talking of Brexit I found it amusing that, when I posted a tweet the other day, people interpreted it in ways I didn’t expect. The tweet just made clear that Brits are nine times more likely to be scammed by criminals than Germans, as we are a major card-based nation. Just in case you cannot…

The confusion of Brexit I often see headlines saying “Britain is leading Europe”. Britain is leading Europe in what? Fraud, tax avoidance, political shenanigans and more. Such headlines always make me laugh, as the media is writing as though Britain is still part of Europe. Did anyone forget about #Brexit? Britain has nothing to do…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Another day, another crash, another hack I stumbled across a tweet about Nomad, a cross-chain bridge, that had just had almost $200 million of crypto assets hacked: The cross-chain token bridge Nomad was exploited, with attackers draining the protocol of virtually all of its funds. The total But…