Grid

I watch too much online these days. Streaming from Amazon, Netflix, Apple TV and more, means you can spend the whole day just binge-watching rubbish. I’ve found myself reverting to watching some older movies, like those made in the 2000s. Fifteen years. 15 years. 15yrs. It’s a long time passing. I put on something the…

Hmmm … the wonderful Anna Irrera posted an update on Reuters, stating that anyone can be a bank these days, along with her colleague Iain Withers. The article is about embedded finance, a term I dislike. I prefer invisible finance but hey, you win some, you lose some. The article notes that Accenture estimated in 2019…

This week’s main blog discussions include … The fine line between banker and jail Some years ago, I regularly talked about bankers being criminals. It’s not a popular theme with the banking community but, a bit like a genius, bankers walk that line between good and bad. Genius’s walk the line between amazing and mad….

Some years ago, I regularly talked about bankers being criminals. It’s not a popular theme with the banking community but, a bit like a genius, bankers walk that line between good and bad. Genius’s walk the line between amazing and mad. It’s a fine line. Thing is that there are bad bankers. There are bankers…

I didn’t think I should share this, but I will. I ran over the dog. Like many other people during the pandemic, we were finally going to be stuck at home long enough to get a puppy. So, we got one. It made me realise that I’m a cat person. The dog was a pain….

One of the things over-looked by many is how banks invest in the Finverse. According to Toptal’s data, 63% of banks invest in startups or set up accelerators, and many are instrumental in FinTech companies’ operations, fund raising and IPOs. Bear in mind that start-ups need bank accounts too, which creates a multi-dependency in the…

I was talking with a friend in Asia and went back to my traditional discussions of how Asia, Africa and LatAm markets are shaking up finance more than Europe and America. They then asked me the difficult question: But what about President Xi? Urmmm, what about President Xi? Well, it’s the question of China’s recent…

What is time? Do you have any idea? What is the time right now? Does it exist? Einstein says ‘no’. “Time does not exist. We invented it.” Some guy called Albert pic.twitter.com/JS9JMfEyJk — Chris Skinner (@Chris_Skinner) August 28, 2021   Building on Einstein’s quote, I used to regularly present that the world has no borders. We…

This week’s main blog discussions include … What if you had “f**k you money”? I was quite taken by South Park’s co-creator Matt Stone talking to Bloomberg, about a deal where he and his co-founder Trey Parker just got paid $900 million to make six more seasons and 14 movies. His specific comment: “As you can…

Simon Taylor posted an interesting dialogue about BaaS the other day. He used a couple of charts to illustrate the banking stack. The easiest and most basic one is this: I quite like it but, as Simon himself notes, there’s lots of nuance missing here. So let me add my layer of nuance, and it’s the…