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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…

I recently spotted this post from Panagiotis Kriaris, who leads business development at Unzer: In the era of #APIs, #openbanking and #openfinance, banking has become a totally different game vs what it used to be calling for equally adapted business models. Let’s take a look at #businessbanking and at 4 potential #digital models for banks….

I just picked up Deloitte’s report on blockchain where 76% of finance executives have voted that digital currencies may overtake fiat currencies in the next decade*. Most of us would just read that statement and go meh. Not me. That’s a phantasmagorical statement. People in finance think fiat currencies are dead? What? If true, we…

I was intrigued by a new report from the IMF entitled: The Impact of Fintech on Central Bank Governance (you can download it for free). I was particularly intrigued by its opening: Central bank governance is a concept composed of four constitutive and interrelated components: a central bank’s (i) mandate, comprising its objectives (the “why”),…

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 see from this deal, we have f**k you money now” … made me think….

The main discussions on the blog this week include … Fires to the left of me, floods to the right and here I am, stuck in the monsoon with you I heard a statistic on the BBC that natural disasters due to weather are costing the insurance industry seven times more today than in the…

I heard a statistic on the BBC that natural disasters due to weather are costing the insurance industry seven times more today than in the 1970s. Is that because people insure against such issues more today? Partly, but it’s also because there are more natural weather disasters happening. For example, take this chart from Statista: Source:…