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This week’s main blog discussions include … If you think Open Banking is where it’s at, think again As someone who has set up a number of small businesses, there are three major tasks that I hate: Doing the accounts Tax returns Invoices As the business owner, all I want to do is my job,…

I love the Darwin Awards. For those who are unfamiliar – is anyone not aware of these awards? – they are given to those who remove themselves from the gene pool in the funniest or stupidest manner. My faves include the guy who launched himself in a chair attached to a host of helium balloons,…

Money 2020 has just dropped an interesting report talking about FinTech 2.0 (although I’m already on FinTech 5.0). In fact 2.0 is a pretty old idea, as outlined in this blog from June 2016, so I think the context of the report is a bit off but the content is pretty good. Here’s the Executive…

As someone who has set up a number of small businesses, there are three major tasks that I hate: Doing the accounts Tax returns Invoices As the business owner, all I want to do is my job, to have fun, to get on with creating more customers and more business. However, the issue with accounts,…

I posted a joke the other day. The joke was that we had not ordered anything online yesterday, and our usual delivery guy called by today to check we were OK. The joke made me realise something. The realisation is that we really have pivoted from a world of stores and streets to a world…

I posted a joke the other day. The joke was that we had not ordered anything online yesterday, and our usual delivery guy called by today to check we were OK. The joke made me realise something. The realisation is that we really have pivoted from a world of stores and streets to a world…

This week’s main blogs include: Should banks have more technologists than Microsoft? I saw an interesting article about the Head of Technology at a major bank, let’s call it ABC Bank for the purposes of my column, and the article began by saying that this guy “commands a budget of $10 billion and a team of 40,000…

As we move from cash to cashless, turbo-charged by the pandemic, there is a fundamental challenge to ATM providers like NCR and Diebold Nixdorf. I had this view back in the 1990s. It’s just taken a quarter of a century to become a reality. In the UK Link, the largest cash machine network, said there…

I saw an interesting article about the Head of Technology at a major bank, let’s call it ABC Bank for the purposes of my column, and the article began by saying that this guy “commands a budget of $10 billion and a team of 40,000 technologists.” $10 billion is about half the total amount invested in European…

Yet another day of reflections – too many of those lately – and thinking about generations. My parents were war parents, living through the Second World War; their parents were people growing up in Edwardian Britain as a carpenter and housewife. Things were different. I don’t remember my parents struggling, although I know my grandparents…